Little Wars

As snow and ice and gas rationing close in on the American home, U.S. games manufacturers are looking forward to their biggest season in years. And that means big.* The old games still flourish. But the real news in games is War, for now the U.S. has lost its military inhibitions.

Air Combat. The war games are generally ingenious, attractive, and in some cases have wartime educational value. Spot-a-plane Game, approved by the U.S. Army & Navy Air Forces, and of obvious value to airplane spotters, is of the parchesi-type. Players progress around the board from "TakeOff" point to "Mission Accomplished" by identifying correctly the silhouettes of pages of the belligerent nations. Since there are 48 silhouettes provided (main omission: the Jap Zero), Spot-a-plane will seem to most adults more like hard work than fun, but air-minded boys like it.

A similar difficulty attaches to Air Combat Trainer, which has been approved by the National Aeronautic Association. On a large board, picturing a photographic aerial map, players place planes which maneuver into combat, one player operating a fighter force which tries to prevent the other's bombers from hitting objectives below: power plant, docks, reservoir, bridge, etc. The game's defect is its complexity, which results from impossible situations, e.g., the spinner will often indicate moves to be made which the player cannot sensibly make.

Best new children's game is Ranger Commandos, a parchesi-type in which little barges set out across open water, zigzag to landings, and move little wooden commando pieces inland to destroy such objectives as a tank factory, railroad yards, munitions plant, etc. Players return posthaste, unless captured, whenever any player lands on a spot marked with an enemy sentry. First one back with the most points of destruction wins.

Strategy. Most adult game buffs prefer the games in which they conceive a strategic plan and then execute it tactically. Of U.S. games of this type, Strategy, designed by Nathan Reinherz, the Irving Berlin of American game designers, and made by Corey Game Co. of Boston, is probably the most satisfactory fun. On an extravagantly colored board two players maneuver four "cannon" and 16 "soldiers," each trying to control and cross five bridges into his opponent's territory, and besiege the enemy capital. The particular pleasure of Strategy comes from the execution of feints by task forces, which draw off the opponent's power, leaving openings for thrusts by a suddenly unveiled major attack in another direction. Battle Checkers and Pacific Defense are post-Pearl Harbor games much advertised. The weakness of the first is that it is too simple and too brief; of the second that the rules are enormously complex and frustratingly detailed.

Battle Tactics. The best war games are foreign. In Tri-Tactics (which is available in limited quantities in the U.S.) the British have probably the best commercial war game. It combines naval, air and land forces in checker-like movements over a map, and was invented by a British games manufacturer, Harry A. Gibson, of H. P. Gibson & Sons, Ltd. in 1932.

As a schoolboy in the Grocers Company School in Hackney Downs, London, young Gibson invented perhaps the best of all naval war games, Dover Patrol, in 1911. (It was not manufactured until he was mustered out of the British horse artillery in 1919.) In 1925 Gibson designed Aviation, an excellent air war game, and bought up the rights to a French infantry war game, L'Attaque! In 1932 he put all three together in one package as Tri-Tactics. (Gibson sold a whole set of his war games for use in the wardroom of the lost British battleship H.M.S. Hood.) Twice bombed out of its posh showrooms and factories by the Germans, the Gibson firm now struggles to manufacture its product in what might be a ramshackle garage, its manufacture cut by priorities to 15%, its staff reduced to 10% of peacetime.

In Tri-Tactics two players face each other across a map on which each maneuvers land, sea and air forces over water and land to capture his opponent's Naval Base or Headquarters ("H.Q."). In general, the major pieces destroy the minor ones, which are removed from the board. Planes and destroyers, working in teams, blast open beachheads after fleet actions; troops land and fight through screens of delaying actions that gradually become major land battles. And a player who has lost a battle because he has inadequate reinforcements, or who was brilliantly outmaneuvered by a lesser force, is likely to regard the next day's headlines with considerably more sympathetic understanding.

Wells & Bel Geddes. Beyond Tri-Tactics real war-games buffs sail into the blue of their own inventions. As long ago as 1914 H. G. Wells, in Little Wars, told how he and his friends had played with toy cannon, soldiers, houses and mock terrain, a play war of "brisk little battles." In 1917 Hudson Maxim, the inventor and explosives expert, revealed with some disgust that he had been forced to redesign his own war game to include the new factor of airpower. A New Yorker profile of Norman Bel Geddes in 1941 noted:

"Around 1915, he invented a fantastically involved war game which was played on a table 16 ft. long and 4 ft. wide, covered with a colored relief map of two mythical countries. There were 14 people to each side, and moves were made with colored tacks that represented infantry, cavalry and artillery. Geddes spent most of his spare time for several years in elaborating this game, ending up with a 45-page book explaining the rules. . . . Thirty minutes of play constituted the equivalent of a day's fighting; during the '20s, Geddes and his friends played it every Wednesday from eight in the evening until midnight. Some wars lasted two or three years. . . . The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried."

Pratt & the Graf Spee. Military Expert Fletcher Pratt of New York City invented in 1929 and has since developed a Naval War Game which actually approximates sea war. One night in 1939 the players looked at each other and whistled. Three light ships had just sunk the German pocket battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, a supposedly impossible feat. But their calculations showed it could be done--and they were not so much surprised as vindicated when the Graf Spee actually got her comeuppance in just that way six months later off Brazil.

Pratt's game uses wooden ship models, representing most of the fleets of the world. Each ship has an exact valuation (worked out from Jane's Fighting Ships and other authoritative references) in thousands of points--so much for armor thickness, so much for fire power, speed and other characteristics. Opposing ships maneuver, and then fire at each other by a complicated system. (Airplanes, torpedoes and submarines are added factors.) Publication by Pratt of a 30-page book describing his game, in 1940, resulted in the formation of over 20 clubs about the country, whose members crawl around the floor one night a week, cheerfully destroying the capital ships of the world.

Morals. The case for war games was perhaps best made, pacifistically, by H. G. Wells in his Little Wars: "How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing! Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of victory or disaster ... and no smashed or sanguinary bodies, no shattered buildings, no devastated countrysides Here is War down to rational proportions. . . . You have only to play at Little War three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War can be.

"Great War is at present . . . not only the most expensive game in the universe, but is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but--the available leads we have for it are too small."

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