Games with toy soldiers existed thousands of years ago, however primarily these little figures of warriors were used more for designation of troops arrangement on maps, rather than for playing.
War games as we know them today appeared in Britain where in 1912 a non-fiction work by Herbert George Wells, an English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, famous for his numerous science fiction novels and short stories, was published. This volume continues the Wells’ ““Little Wars”, offering however much interesting detailed information not only on war-games, but also all sorts of pleasant facts about imaginative games with bricks, boards and planks, tin ships, Easter eggs, clockwork railways. Wells says: “I am going to tell of some of these games and what is most needed to play them; I have tried them all and a score of others like them with my sons, and all of the games here illustrated have been set out by us. I am going to tell of them here because I think what we have done will interest other fathers and mothers, and perhaps be of use to them (and to uncles and such-like tributary sub-species of humanity) in buying presents for their own and other people's children.”