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As a schoolboy in the Grocers Company School in Hackney Downs, London, young Gibson invented perhaps the best of all naval war games, Dover Patrol, in 1911. (It was not manufactured until he was mustered out of the British horse artillery in 1919.) In 1925 Gibson designed Aviation, an excellent air war game, and bought up the rights to a French infantry war game, L'Attaque! In 1932 he put all three together in one package as Tri-Tactics. (Gibson sold a whole set of his war games for use in the wardroom of the lost British battleship H.M.S. Hood.) Twice bombed out of its posh showrooms and factories by the Germans, the Gibson firm now struggles to manufacture its product in what might be a ramshackle garage, its manufacture cut by priorities to 15%, its staff reduced to 10% of peacetime.
In Tri-Tactics two players face each other across a map on which each maneuvers land, sea and air forces over water and land to capture his opponent's Naval Base or Headquarters ("H.Q."). In general, the major pieces destroy the minor ones, which are removed from the board. Planes and destroyers, working in teams, blast open beachheads after fleet actions; troops land and fight through screens of delaying actions that gradually become major land battles. And a player who has lost a battle because he has inadequate reinforcements, or who was brilliantly outmaneuvered by a lesser force, is likely to regard the next day's headlines with considerably more sympathetic understanding.
Wells & Bel Geddes. Beyond Tri-Tactics real war-games buffs sail into the blue of their own inventions. As long ago as 1914 H. G. Wells, in Little Wars, told how he and his friends had played with toy cannon, soldiers, houses and mock terrain, a play war of "brisk little battles." In 1917 Hudson Maxim, the inventor and explosives expert, revealed with some disgust that he had been forced to redesign his own war game to include the new factor of airpower. A New Yorker profile of Norman Bel Geddes in 1941 noted:
"Around 1915, he invented a fantastically involved war game which was played on a table 16 ft. long and 4 ft. wide, covered with a colored relief map of two mythical countries. There were 14 people to each side, and moves were made with colored tacks that represented infantry, cavalry and artillery. Geddes spent most of his spare time for several years in elaborating this game, ending up with a 45-page book explaining the rules. . . . Thirty minutes of play constituted the equivalent of a day's fighting; during the '20s, Geddes and his friends played it every Wednesday from eight in the evening until midnight. Some wars lasted two or three years. . . . The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried."