Hand to Hand Combat
Wartime Dexterity Games
Getting back to basics, the most obvious way to have fun simulating war is taking aim at targets and pulling the trigger. Kids have long played in yards and woods using makeshift weapons with imaginary bullets. H.G. Wells used manual dexterity as a means of determining the accuracy of attacking units and the resulting casualties when playing war on the floor. Game makers have offered plenty of ways to play at war through manual dexterity and skill.
The first shooter games appeared in the early 1900s and were very popular during WWI. In the United States, both Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley published such games.
The box cover of The French Army from Parker’s European War Game Series is shown above. It uses a spring-loaded wooden cannon that shoots wooden bullets. The targets are cardboard, mounted on wooden stands.
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The Great European War Game, also from Parker, offered a variety of targets on foot and on horseback, and featured a spring-loaded rifle that fired wooden bullets.
These games remained popular even during World War II. This 1940s game of Soldiers from Concord Games has traditional cardboard targets in old-style dress uniforms and a typical wooden cannon, but the box shows a two-engine monoplane bomber flying over the battlefield!
Target shooting games did not restrict themselves to guns. During WWII, for instance, Corey Games took the ubiquitous Tiddledy Wink and turned it into a war-themed game. Tiddly Winks Barrage Game had a box featuring a large coastal defense gun firing out over the water.
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Inside the box is a raised map-like board. There is a blue, watery trench down the middle. On each side, the landscape is marked with four red squares of different sizes.
The largest is labelled Air Field, followed by Sea Port, Munitions Works and Dump, and then the smallest, the Capital. In the middle of each side is a white Battery Emplacement square, from which players launch their winks at the enemy.
Another popular mechanism was the see-saw launcher. This usually had a wooden plank balanced on a cylinder, as shown below this board from a WWII title. The wooden disks are placed over the hole on the long end of the plank. Players then press down sharply on the short end to launch the missile.
This board comes from a Samuel Lowe Co. box titled Hornet Airplane Games. The box holds two boards. One has a simple roll-and-move game. This one shows an aerial view of an urban area.
Circles mark the target areas. An Oil Depot and Wireless Station has the highest value, worth 5000 points. This is followed by Docks (4000 points), three Warships (3000, 2000, and 1000), Factory (3000), Railway Station (2,000), and Warehouses and Freight Yards (1000 each). Players lose points for hitting a Residences (-1000), the School (-2000) and the Hospital (-3000).
Samuel Lowe published a very similar set with the title Land and Sea War Games. Despite the title, the target game involves shooting down airplanes, which have values from 250 to 2000 points. There are only two penalty targets: hitting parachuting pilots cost players either 500 or 1000 points.
Whitman’s Victory Bomber has a slightly more sophisticated launcher. This is a hinged metal spring that launches specially shaped wooden bombs. Landing a bomb with the small end down scores double, and doing so in the Victory space wins the game outright.
Bomber Ball is a more elaborate bomb-dropping game. It has both a target board in the bottom of the box and two three-dimensional cardboard ships (one an aircraft carrier) that are placed on the floor.
The bomber is a brightly colored cardboard shape with four holes for marble-sized bombs along its fuselage. Holding the bombs in place is a cardboard panel that can be drawn back with a string, allowing one bomb to drop at a time. The game comes with both marbles and softer balls that can be rubbed with chalk to make it easier to see where a bomb has hit.
Marbles can be used in many ways for shooting at targets. Pressman and Co.’s Bomb the Navy included cardboard cut-out ships and stands. Players rolled marbles along the floor trying to hit them.
Marbles also are used in this WWII game called Down the Hatch! Skill is less important in this game. Instead of launching or rolling the marbles, players drop them into a central tower, which has a pyramid at the bottom. The marbles fall, bounce sideways and come to rest in colored circles on the board. Each player has a color and gets points only for dropping marbles into holes of his own color.
Marbles come into play in bagatelle (pinball) games, such as Bomber uber England, which is described in the section on WWII.
Miniature marbles can be seen in handheld dexterity games, where players have to juggle balls into multiple target holes at once.
This game, Blackout, features bombers coming in for a run over a city street. Players have to maneuver the balls into holes representing sources of light such as streetlamps and windows.
Similarly, small marbles are juggled into target holes in these two games. Put the Yanks in Berlin and Trap the Jap in Tokyo offer a broad strategic look at the European and Pacific theaters respectively.
Juggling games used other shapes and materials to provide a challenge. Flight Formation, for instance, used cardboard airplane shapes that had to be shuffled into corresponding cut-outs in the board. The Bomber asked players to nudge small wooden cylinders into slots on the wing of a cardboard bomber that could in turn move slightly to make the challenge more difficult.
These days, dexterity challenges are usually in the domain of computer or videogame controllers. There is no shortage of such war-themed games, and most go back to the principles of aim and reflexes. The first-person shooter is the dominant dexterity wargame. This usually involves the player acting as an individual within a virtual world, facing either computer-driven or online opponents.
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