D.&D., of course, has deeply informed the entertainment revolution that was ignited by the rise and widespread distribution of computing power. But while it’s possible to bring a measure of on-the-fly creativity to bear during a round of multiplayer Call of Duty, video games have stripped away much of what makes face-to-face gaming so compelling. (And I say that as an avid electronic and tabletop gamer both.) The sense of collaboration and shared storytelling has been replaced by high-def graphics and product placements from weapons manufacturers. It’s no longer a matter of carefully aiming your matchstick cannon at a cavalry detachment in a gripping struggle for control of the carpet. Now you’re expected to frag enough noobs to earn the SCAR-H assault rifle that will let you maintain your position on the Black Ops leader boards.

In a world in which war itself has been transformed, perhaps that’s only to be expected. War, since Wells’s day, has become increasingly depersonalized; the image of a military drone delivering death from thousands of miles away is emblematic of the ways in which conflict has changed. Games have tracked those changes, it’s true. But they have also made attempts to highlight and even resist them. The depersonalizing military advance of Wells’s day — the automatic machine gun, which delivered a brutally efficient, industrialized kind of death not seen before on the battlefield — is absent entirely from “Little Wars.”

Still, Wells was keen to maintain a certain level of verisimilitude. “Little Wars” produced what he described as “little brisk fights” in a game that was “in a dozen aspects extraordinarily like a small real battle.” So real, in fact, that Wells hoped his game might deter its players from participating in the genuine article. “How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!” he wrote toward the end of the book. “Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster — and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated countrysides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet and charming thing that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.”

Wells — along with much of the rest of the world — could sense something on the horizon, and he did not like what he saw coming: “You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it 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 heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”