Jim Dunnigan's Foreword to 'H.G. Wells' Floor Games'

Following is the Foreword to Skirmisher Publishing LLC's edition of H.G. Wells' Floor Games, written by veteran game designer and SPI founder James F. Dunnigan. 

H.G. Wells (the science fiction author), along with Fred Jane (of the "Janes" series of military references), were the founders of modern commercial wargaming. They were the first to publish simple but realistic wargames that civilians could handle and enjoy. Jane did it for naval wargaming, and Wells did it for land wargaming. They did it a century ago, but it took more than half a century before their ideas became a mass market item.

Wargaming has been around for thousands of years, but was rarely written about. It was largely something that was passed down orally, or reinvented time and again. One ancient wargame that has survived is chess. But over the centuries, chess lost many elements that made it more realistic, and more recognizable, as a wargame.

With that kind of history, how did Floor Games, which was basically "wargames for children," find a market? Wells probably remembered his own childhood. Many clever kids invent wargames, often quite complex ones, as part of growing up, and then leave it all behind as "kid stuff" when they grow older. I discovered this effect during the 1970s, when I began doing media appearances as an expert on wargaming and military affairs.
Several interviewers mentioned that, when they were kids, they had invented their own wargames. Some of them, who were kids during World War II, really got into it. They often had kin in uniform, so the wargames were more than just play, they were a way to better understand what was going on.

Apparently, hundreds of thousands of American kids were creating their own wargames during World War II. Such activity dropped off after the war, but the potential interest remained. Those homemade wargames were very similar to those Wells describes in Floor Games, although I rarely heard of anyone using a copy of Floor Games or his even more famous Little Wars. It just came naturally. I later found out that those people who eagerly took up wargames in the 1970s -- namely journalists, lawyers, scientists and what I liked to call "the overeducated" -- were the same ones who had been reinventing wargames for generations.

The classic case of reinventing wargames can be found in Napoleon Bonaparte, who had both a background in math and an appetite for data. It seemed only natural that he would plan his campaigns as if they were wargames. This is confirmed by first person accounts of Napoleon doing his planning on the big map with the pins in it, and with assistants answering questions about road networks, supply capacities, and all manner of technical trivia that only a wargamer could love or even care about.

Floor Games was meant to be a kid's game. But two years later, Wells penned a version for adults, Little Wars. And 50 years after that, Avalon Hill, then SPI, began publishing dozens of wargames a year. By the 1990s, the games were computerized, and now they are all over the Internet.

H.G. Wells would have considered that science fiction -- and he would have loved it.