In an earlier post I discussed the board games of my 70’s childhood. That one was popular, so here’s an essay about the games that came after.
One evening in 1977, my dad mentioned that some of the kids at the college where he taught were playing a strange new game that was played with pencil and paper and a variety of eccentric dice. Also sometimes lead figurines, but how they fit into the game did was unclear. He was talking, of course, about Dungeons & Dragons, which at the time was only three years old and very much a niche activity for the kind of young man who owned several Frank Frazetta posters. My older brother Rob, who had been obsessed with fantasy since my father read us the Lord of the Rings, wanted to try this thing out, so the next Saturday my dad drove us out to the Hobby Models store in Peoria, Illinois.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Midwest was a hotbed of indie game production, and the birthplace of role playing games. Dungeons & Dragons was the product of game publisher Tactical Studies Rules, and TSR was situated in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; the science fiction RPG Traveler, which was an early competitor to D & D, was published by Game Designers’ Workshop, located in Normal, Illinois. Even before he co-created Dungeons & Dragons, designer Gary Gygax had established the annual game convention that would become Gen Con (named after Lake Geneva, its original host city).
The first time I entered the Hobby Models store was as much a mind-expanding experience as if I had wandered into a head shop on Ocean Front Walk1. We may have come in search of Dungeons & Dragons, but the inventory ranged from model rockets to balsa wood and tissue kits to an enormous yellow Computer Space cabinet, the first coin-op video game (1971). Roughly a third of the floor space was dedicated to Napoleonic miniature war games. A small group of scraggly men in torn jeans and stained tee-shirts were hunched over a miniature battle ground made of green felt stuck on a sheet of plywood, supported by a pair of saw horses. On this battleground were hundreds of painted metal figures of infantry, calvary, and artillery. Players made their moves by measuring inches with a ruler; once a unit had fired in a turn, tufts of cotton smoke were placed as markers until the next turn, usually an hour or two later at the rate they played.
The front of the store was where the indy games were, and here Rob was able to procure a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. For anyone who has not seen the original booklets this game came in: the rules were next to indecipherable. There were only three ill-defined character classes and the text kept referring to an earlier game by Gygax, Chainmail, which was a set of rules for miniature play. The set actually told players they would need a copy of Chainmail, which seemed to me (and still seems to me today) like a cheap move by TSR.
Why not check the whole thing out on the Internet Archive?
In a way, the original game of D&D was a set of story-based interludes to spice up your figurine play, and it was only after a series of four supplementary books that the game evolved into its recognizable stand-alone form that charmed nerds across the nation and terrified their parents, who by the early 1980s believed the pastime to be demonic.
Rob was 13 when he began to play role-playing games with friends and I was 10. I wish I could say that I took to the game as well, but 1) I found the constant dice rolls took me out of the fantasy, and 2) Rob didn’t want his dumb brother hanging around and harshing his game night vibes. But while I wasn’t much of a player, I did find the rule books fascinating, and even more so the many odd games that emerged in Dungeons and Dragons‘ wake. There was Tunnels & Trolls, whose name was a bit too on-the-nose as a clone. There was Chivalry & Sorcery, whose rules were maybe 20 times more complex and were printed in blotchy 9-point text that looked as if it had been photocopied a dozen times. There was Bunnies & Burrows, in which players played as rabbits à la Watership Down.
But if RPGs were not for me, Hobby Models also was a doorway to the a fascinating world of small-press board games, and particularly microgames, that I did come to love. But since this essay is already longer than I planned, I will get to those next post. To be continued.
- I have searched in vain for interior photographs of this store from the late 70s or early 80s but I guess not everything has made it into the digital era. I did, however, find this charming advertisement from (I’m guessing) the 1960s: ↩︎
