One evening in 1913, at the home of H. G. Wells — yes, the author of The War of the Worlds — his friend Jerome K. Jerome, the writer of Three Men in a Boat, picked up a toy cannon and started firing at lead soldiers lined up on the floor. Wells joined the battle. When they stopped, they realized one thing: with a few written rules, there was a real game in there.
That game became Little Wars, the first wargame manual with miniatures designed for the general public. It was played on the floor, with lead armies and a battlefield built with whatever was at hand — usually piles of books or other toys. One hundred and twelve years later, IELLO has put that idea into an 21-centimeter box. Soldà Tiny — Little Soldiers in the original — is signed by Adrien Fenouillet and Florent Baudry. But the name that stands out on the cover is that of the illustrator: Paul Mafayon, the man behind the aesthetics of King of Tokyo Dark Edition and half of IELLO's catalog. It's his cartoon soldiers, green against yellow, that give the game its distinctive look.
Ten figurines, seventy-four cards, seven dice, three laces, and a wooden spoon-catapult. And no board: you bring the terrain.
The initial choice is the most radical: build a wargame and remove the board. No map, no printed terrain. The battlefield is your table, just as it is.
You set up to play and realize you're already playing. Even before moving a soldier, you have to look around and decide what becomes what. The coffee cup is a watchtower. The box from another game is a hill. The jam jar, left out from breakfast, is an insurmountable wall. The rule is simple: anything taller than a toy soldier acts as an obstacle.
This is where Soldà Tiny does something regular wargames don't. It doesn't give you a pre-designed world; it asks you to see your own. The messy kitchen stops being messy and becomes topography. For a moment, you look at the breakfast table through the eyes of a general — or a child, which is essentially the same thing.
There's no board to prepare. Before each game, you look at what's in front of you — plates, glasses, boxes, books — and transform it into terrain: bunkers, shelters, observation points.
The battlefield changes with each game because your table changes. Setup isn't the step before the game. It IS the game.
The rest is disarmingly simple. Movement isn't done by eye: it's measured with laces, stretching a string from the base of the soldier and going around obstacles, without shortcuts through objects. You shoot with dice and line of sight. And when a big shot is needed, the most beloved piece in the box comes into play: a wooden spoon on a pivot that launches grenade tokens with its own unique imprecision — and which in many homes has already acquired a nickname.
"Little Soldiers? Worms meets Toy Story."
— Ludiquement.fr
Let's go back to that evening in 1913, because that's where Little Soldiers — the international name for Soldà Tiny — reveals what it truly is. In the most famous photograph, Wells plays on the floor with a string in his hand, cut to the exact length his soldiers can move. Today, that same movement is measured with laces. Wells's artillery was a toy cannon that fired wooden cylinders to knock down soldiers: here it's a wooden spoon. The battlefield, for Wells, was piles of books and other toys; here it's your table.
Three tools, exactly a century apart, almost identical. Even the names echo each other: from Little Wars to Little Soldiers. In between, there has been everything: Crossbows & Catapults in the eighties, on which an entire generation wore out their knees, and then increasingly larger wargames, manuals hundreds of pages long, hexagonal boards, firing tables. The craft spent a century adding layers.
| Culture |
The instinct that precedes rules When Wells wrote Little Wars, he wasn't inventing a military simulation. He was writing down a game that children had always played: taking what's in the house and waging war with it. Every miniature game born after is a variation on that gesture. Little Soldiers skips all variations and returns to the gesture: imagination, some toy soldiers, and what you have on the table. H. G. Wells, Little Wars, 1913 — the first wargame manual with miniatures for the general public |
Little Soldiers removes those layers all at once and brings you right back to the starting point — not out of laziness, but because that's where the game was freest. It's light, immediate, designed for laughter as a cardboard grenade flies towards the wrong glass. And it does something that deeper games sometimes forget: it reminds you where it all comes from.
Little Soldiers didn't invent anything. It just reminded us that the first battlefield, for most of us, was the living room floor.
A column that tells the stories behind games. This was the sixteenth.
Soldà Tiny is available on Frogames.
https://frogames.it
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