The war on the floor

[Administrator]

H.G. Wells left quite a mark. He destroyed civilisation half a dozen times. He infested Woking with Martians. He took us to the end of time and back again. He pretty much co-founded science fiction as a genre. That stuff is well-known, but I hadn't been aware that he also invented the 4X strategy game. Here he is describing its exploration phase.
In this game the floor is the sea [...] There are altogether four islands, two to the reader's right and two to the left, and the nearer ones are the more northerly; it is as many as we could get into the camera. The northern island to the right is most advanced in civilization, and is chiefly temple. That temple has a flat roof, diversified by domes made of half Easter eggs and cardboard cones.
That's from a book called Floor Games; a guide on how to build things, interesting things, on the nursery floor, as an imaginative space to explore. Here's an archipelago he made with his kids, and an idea of how they explored it.
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