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by walshemj 4533 days ago
Interesting though HG Wells arguably produced the first "wargame" with little wars published in 1913. And even in the USA Fletcher Pratt and Jack Scruby predate Tactics

Will defiantly have to see if I can get a copy as i am sure my war-gaming club woudl enjoy it.

2 comments

In my experience, for a lot of people who are into them, the term "wargame" implicitly means old-school Avalon Hill-style hex-and-counter board wargames. The same people would just refer to miniatures games like Little Wars as "miniatures games", but out of convenience rather than ignorance.

Pedantically, they should be calling them "board wargames" and "miniatures wargames", but the terminology somehow got simplified to "wargames" and "miniatures games". Mechanically the two genres can be very similar though, if not identical.

Actually at least in the UK its the inverse "wargame" tends to be applied to games with figures the AH type of game would be lumped in as a board game.
It's a bottomless pit - prior to HG Wells were the various kriegsspiels, though of course they weren't games in the entertainment sense - but very much forerunners of Ruhnke's philosophy of learning through games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)