42 April 2019
S
everal years before famed
novelist H.G. Wells would pioneer
miniatures wargaming in his 1913
book Little Wars, a little-known
female French designer created
a board game that would go on to become a
landmark of strategy gaming in its own right.
In November 1908, Hermance Edan led a
patent for her invention of a “jeu de bataille
avec pièces mobiles sur damier” – a “battle
game with moving parts on a chequerboard”.
e patent for the then-unnamed game
was granted the following year; Edan
dubbed it L’Attaque. From 1910, the French
manufacturer Au Jeu Retrouvé began selling
the game.A two-player showdown, L’Attaque played out
on a nine-by-ten-square board, with sections of
impassable water terrain. Each player controlled
an army of 36 pieces, representing French and
English soldiers of varying strengths. Players
would alternate turns, moving their troops
across the gridded battle eld in an attempt to
capture their opponent’s planted ag.
Key to L’Attaque’s uniqueness was its hidden
information. Both players could arrange their
units as they pleased during setup, with the
faces of rival tokens hidden. When a piece
moved into a position where it was back-to-
back with an opponent, the controlling player
could shout “Attack!” to reveal both units and
eliminate the weaker one.As well as standard soldiers, players could
also place stationary mines, which would blow
up any piece except the sappers able to remove
them. Scouts could move multiple squares in
a straight line. Most important was each side’s
spy, which was the only unit able to capture the
powerful commander-in-chief – but could be
stopped by any unit that discovered it.
“ e early edition featured French and
English soldiers, but whether it was based on the
Napoleonic wars, we don’t know,” says Michael
Gibson. “In some ways, it seems unlikely that
the French would publish a game based on a
military campaign in which they were defeated!”
It was Gibson’s father and uncle, Harry
Aisbitt Gibson and Robert Gill Gibson, who