Fog of War, 1908

On 26 November 1908 a Parisian named Hermance Edan, then fifty-six, applied for a French patent for un jeu de bataille avec pièces mobiles sur damier — a battle game with movable pieces on a board. It was granted the following year as patent no. 396.795. Its new idea was the fog: every piece stands with its rank facing its owner, so you learn what an enemy piece is only when two pieces meet.

She showed it in 1909 at the Concours Lépine, the Paris inventors’ fair, beside another game of hers. It sold in France through La Samaritaine and reached Britain before the First World War, where H.P. Gibson & Sons later made it for decades. The hidden-army games sold today descend from it. She was born in 1851, died in 1934, and kept designing and publishing games until then. Of her life before 1908, almost nothing is known.

Where the sources disagree

When it was first sold as “L’Attaque”, and by whom: One account has her publishing it herself in 1909; another has the firm Au Jeu Retrouvé selling it under that name from 1910.
When Gibson took it on: “Around 1920”, “the 1920s” and 1925 all appear. Everyone agrees on the decades that followed.
Where the idea came from: Thierry Depaulis reports that papers from her estate say she developed the game in the 1880s. Michel Boutin argued she drew on the Japanese game Gunjin Shōgi. We have not seen the primary papers, so we give both.

Sources

Checked 2026-10-02. These are secondary sources; the patent itself sits in the French national patent records. Next: Classic Situations, or play a game.