Charles Grant, like Donald Featherstone (see other reviews) was a leading figure in the British wargaming in the 1970s. This book focuses only on the ancient wargame, roughly from Egyptians and Assyrians down through Greeks and Persians to the Romans. Much of this parallels Featherstone's work, but this book is interesting because besides the regular army vs. army wargame, he discusses individual vs. individual combat, especially reproducing the struggles of gladiators in the Roman arenas. This contributed to the small-party fantasy combats that led to Dungeons and Dragons, and it also remains (with or without fantasy elements) a standard sub-genre of role-playing games down to the present. ( )