Miniatures

BrikWars challenges you to take all the random Lego, Playskool, and other construction/little plastic toys you have around, and fight battles with them -- with a clever set of rules that encompasses the basic tropes of the hardcore miniatures game, but with an unusual "rules are made to be broken" slant.

Pirates -- there have been several iterations now, starting with Pirates of the Spanish Main, with Pirates: Rise of the Fiends being the latest -- is a trading card game. Sorta kind. Or it's a miniatures game in which you don't have to paint the damn miniatures, which is what always stopped me from being a miniatures gamer. Any how you look at it, though, it's a damn clever little thing, and given how kitschy pirates are in general, it's amazing it's been a commercial success. I mean, Wizkids has gone through 10 expansions from the originals now, they actually ran TV commercials for the damn thing, and you can find it at Walmart -- I have to assume it's a commercial success.

On this particular Tabletop Tuesday, it is our honour and privilege to direct your attention to the seminal game Little Wars, designed by the late Herbert George Wells. (Since last week we pointed to a game published in 1904, we thought we'd do something more modern; Little Wars was published in 1913.) And lest some of our readers of the gentler sex take objection to our subtitle, we will note that this is indeed the subtitle Mr. Wells (that advocate of the female suffrage, and proponent of Free Love) chose for his own ouevre.

Little Wars is a game of enormous importance, at least for those of us interested in the historical evolution of games as a medium; the first commercially published rules for gaming with military miniatures, it leads directly to the modern miniatures wargaming industry (including such offshoots as Warhammer)--and indirectly to the board wargame, the tabletop roleplaying game; and to all of the digital game styles influenced thereby, including computer wargames, the RTS, digital RPGs, and (of course) massively multiplayer games.