H G Wells invented hobby wargaming--see his book.Little Wars, online at Project Gutenberg
Article in BBC 2013
Just now came across his book
= new reply since forum marked as read
He did indeed pretty much invent hobby wargaming although lots of twists and turns between him and today's world.
Just back from playing a game of "Hail Caesar" this afternoon in which my "perfect" plan got skunked badly by the dice. 
I play and collect Cruel Seas (after rewriting the rules to make more sense out of them) Blood Red Skies (that was on Wednesday this week) and Hail Caesar, sometimes a bit of Black Powder, but don't need to collect those as the hosts have more than enough figs. Bolt Action hasn't impressed me other than a potential money suck and I'm not starting another scale as my WWII is in 1/285th for WRG 1925-50.
One of the fellows at today's Hail Caesar game (boy did I get skunked by my opponents dice rolling) brought along his copy of SPQR and was showing it off. Looks workable to me and I will look forward to him putting it on.
Next week is Wings of Glory WWI. We will have a four player Free for All as we try to learn the rules.
What are you collecting/playing??
The information on H.G Wells is located a few paragraphs further into the article.
https://www.hmgs.org/page/WargamingHistory
Military Wargaming
Modern miniature wargames (See "What is Miniature Wargaming"
are quite similar to military wargames in one respect. Both actually evolved from games played principally for fun. The first of the military games is thought to have been Wei-Hai ("encirclement" , a Chinese game which is usually now called Go. A later, similar game was the Indian Chaturanga, the system from which chess in its various forms came about. Chess itself gave birth to at least one game which more formally depicted armed combat. This was the 1644 design known as The King's Game from one Christopher Weikmann. It included 30 pieces per side of 14 military types, each with a different fixed rate of movement. Like its predecessors, it was played principally for pleasure but differed by its emphasis on the strategic level of war.
The first game to break away from chess, however, was invented by Helwig, Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick in 1780. This game included 1666 squares, each coded for a different rate of movement depending on the terrain the square represented. Playing pieces now represented groups of men instead of a single soldier, and each unit was rated for different movement (infantry moved 8 spaces, heavy cavalry 12, for example). There were also special rules for such things as pontooneers and the like. In 1795, Georg Vinturinus, a military writer from Schleswig, produced a more complex version of Helwig's game. He modified it in 1798 by using a mapboard that depicted actual terrain on the border between France and Belgium.
Nevertheless, such innovations did not move wargames out of the entertainment world into that of the military until 1811 when a Prussian father-son team began to make their studies known. The father, Baron von Reisswitz, was a civilian war counselor to the Prussian court at Breslau. During the dark days of Prussian domination by the Napoleon, Reisswitz introduced a game that used a specific scale (1:2373) and a sand table instead of a map grid. In 1811 the game was observed by two Prussian princes who then showed it to the King. The game immediately became the rage at both the Prussian and Russian courts, but professional soldiers saw little use for it. All that change in 1824. In that year Reisswitz' son,Leutnant George Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz of the Prussian Guard Artillery, introduced his own version of his father's game. The game was called Anleitung zur Darstelling militarische manuver mit dem apparat des Kriegsspiels (Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame) and included a number of new innovations, the most important of which were the use of actual topographical maps to portray the battlefield and rigid rules which specifically quantified the effects of combat.
