I felt the section for
"Floor Games" on Boardgamegeek was a bit empty, so I decided to read the book (again) and
post a little review.
The review is given here as well.
This review is based on the 1912 edition of
Floor Games, published by
Small, Maynard and Company, but there’s no reason to assume the 1911 edition was anything different.
The title
Floor Games
is somewhat misleading. The book does not describe games with a proper
set of rules, but rather a number of playful activities for children and
adults alike. I guess the main reason this little book is known in the
gaming community is due to its famous author, as well as it being the
older sibling of a more famous book, “
Little Wars”, which is often seen as the first published hobby wargame to be played with toy soldiers.
Nevertheless,
Floor Games
is an enjoyable read. The book, using a large font size and narrative
style is obviously aimed at children. The book is written from the point
of view of
H.G.Wells playing these games with his sons
George Philip (1901) and
Frank Richard
(1903), only referred to as G.P.W. and F.R.W. in the book. The book is
also not that long, it can easily be read in less than an hour.
The first chapter, “
The Toys to Have”,
describes all the toys needed to set up the games described in later
chapters: wooden blocks, an electric train, (metal) toy soldiers and
animals, but also what Wells calls “boards and planks”. The latter serve
as the playing surface, and holes should be drilled into them as to
place twigs and such to form woods and forests. As for the toy soldiers,
it is interesting to read that there seems to be a lack of “civilian
types”, and there’s a call to toy manufacturers to take note and please
produce all sorts of non-military figures as well.
The second chapter is titled “
The Game of the Wonderful Islands”.
Various boards should be arranged on the floor (which serves as the
sea) such that an archipelago is formed. Each island is then dressed up
with trees, temples, buildings, minerals (silver paper!), tribesmen and
animals, waiting to be discovered by explorers arriving by ship. The
parties land and alter things, build and rearrange, hoist paper flags,
subjugate populations and “
confer all the blessings of civilization upon these lands”
(this is still the time of European colonial expansion). The game lasts
as long as all the players want them to last, after which everything is
put away and a new game can be started.
Chapter 3, “
Of the Building of Cities”
describes a very similar game, but now the playing field is taken up by
a large city area, divided in two. The city is conveniently a twin city
(London and Westminster, or Buda and Pesth (sic)), and it is agreed
that railway tracks are shared such that trains can run between both
parts of the city without negotiations or administration. All sorts of
things happen on the cities, such as an election for mayor(only citizens
with two legs and at least one arm and capable of standing up can vote –
but not children, boy scouts or women!) The chapter vividly describes
the entire city lay-out: farms, museums, shops (with paper billboards),
the zoological gardens, train stations, duck ponds, parades, etc.
The last chapter has the longest title “
Funiculars, marble Towers, Castles and War Games, but Very Little of War Games”,
but is actually the shortest. It describes a few additional games, such
as building a funicular (a mountain railway track sloping downhill,
with the purpose of letting a loaded car roll from top to bottom), or
building a marble tower, which is really the same idea but using marbles
instead of a railway track. The last page in the book is about building
a castle and war games, but of the latter “
… I must either write
volumes or nothing. Let it be nothing. Some day, perhaps, I will write a
great book about the war game and tell of battles and campaigns and
strategy and tactics. But this time I set out merely to tell of the
ordinary joys of playing with the floor, and to gird improvingly and
usefully at toymakers.” Quite a statement to end, knowing that “
Little Wars” was published only 2 years later.
So does
Floor Games
still have relevance today? It is of course firmly linked to the
history of toy soldier games, and subsequently hobby wargaming and
everything that came after that (so pretty much the entire gaming hobby
as we know it today), and as such, it is of interest to anyone
interested in the history of the gaming hobby.
But I was especially struck by the notion that
Floor Games
is not an outdated book. Indeed, it describes activities that children
must have played since then (and probably before). When I look back on
my own childhood during the 1970s, me and my siblings were very lucky to
have our own play-room (which later turned into my bedroom when me and
my brother were too old to share a bedroom, but that’s a different
story). In that play-room, we had a large table on which we laid out an
electric train, houses were made with Lego bricks, we added plastic toy
animals in the landscape, and our Matchbox cars were driving around on
the streets made from grey cardboard and masking tape. Very Wells-like,
now that I think of it, and as Wells writes as well, “
the setting out of the city is half the game”. Perhaps the activities describes on
Floor Games
were not at all uncommon in those days as well, although I suspect that
in 1911 these were the privilege of children belonging to a certain
social class whose parents could afford all the toys described in the
book.
Obviously, modern toys have changed since Wells’ days. Kids
these days no longer have metal toy soldiers or wooden bricks, but they
do have
Lego and
Playmobil, and I see them building
cities, connecting them by electric trains, populating the city with toy
people and animals, and inventing all sorts of adventures for their
imaginary worlds.
I guess
Floor Games could as well have been published today!
