Little Wars

For his work on novels like War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, British author H.G. Wells is rightly lauded as a visionary. What often gets lost amongst the applause for his ideas on science fiction though is another area in which he was a pioneer: the field of tabletop wargaming. Which, at least as far as we know it today, was basically invented by Wells while he and a friend were playing with toy soldiers.

Wells did not invent the idea of using abstract rules to simulate th...