How Gaming Got Its Dice

For those of us who grew up with Dungeons & Dragons, it is easy to take the polyhedral dice of gaming for granted. Dice had played an integral role in gaming since Prussian wargamers of the early nineteenth century first developed combat resolution tables. Those games and the many works they influenced, however, relied exclusively on 6-sided dice, apart from a few experimental dead-ends (like Totten's 12-sided teetotum in the late nineteenth century). When modern hobby wargaming culture began in the 1950s, it too stuck with 6-siders: the first Avalon Hill game (Tactics, 1954) requires a "cubit" for combat resolution, and the miniature gamers who contributed to the War Game Digest similarly seemed content to rely on the d6. By 1970, however, polyhedral dice had begun to creep into the wargaming community, as we see in the advertisement above from a 1971 Wargamer's Newsletter. Why do we need those funny dice anyway? What purpose did they serve that an ordinary 6-sider couldn't?

[UPDATE: See my guide to identifying 1970s dice here.]

Strategos in the Twin Cities

Twin Cities gamers of the late 1960s found inspiration for their wargaming systems in a pretty unlikely source: Strategos: The American Art of War (1880), a work by Charles A. L. Totten. Strategos was a military training wargame modeled on the German precedents of the nineteenth century, and was therefore not designed with entertainment in mind. By modern standards, it is unwieldy, pedantic and dull.  Famously, Dave Wesely adapted the rules of Strategos to the Napoleonic era, reducing them from the two volumes of Totten down to just twenty-four pages in his Strategos N (1970). But the Napoleonic era was only one of the settings that local gamers fitted to Strategos, and Dave Arneson himself authored two Strategos-based wargames.

Gary Gygax on Christmas and Christianity

A note from Gary Gygax in the IFW Monthly of February 1969. A topical historical curiosity, yes, but what does it tell us about who Gary was back then? First of all, he strongly self-identified as a Christian, an important counterpoint to the fundamentalist backlash against his later fantasy-themed games. Gary approached Christianity as a system with rules, which he researched and explored through a strict historical lens. If his readings differed from mainstream conventions, he was never one to bow to popular opinion. Sometimes he took things too seriously, sacrificing fun for accuracy. He was never shy about sharing his ideas and defending his position in public, but respectfully acknowledges the existence of dissenting views. These are all qualities we see reflected in his subsequent career as a game designer.

Speaking as someone who is not particularly religious, but nonetheless celebrates Christmas with a tree, gift-giving and feasting, I also find in Gary's words here a welcome reminder that Christmas and Christianity are not as tightly coupled as one might think. Happy holidays!

Gaming is Now 100 Years Old

Gaming as we know it - that is, a hobby surrounding commercial games that simulate conflict, marketed to the general public for entertainment - began one hundred years ago, in December 1912. That's when H.G. Wells published the first installment of his Little Wars in the Christmas issue of Windsor Magazine. Wells was already famous for the science-fiction novels he had published in the 1890s, but his more recent work focused more on the present day, and the looming shadow of war that hung over Europe. By going beyond just writing about war, and instead providing seminal rules for simulating it, Wells laid the groundwork for all of the twentieth-century gaming that would follow.

The Early Works of Gary Gygax

The beginning of Gary Gygax's career as a game designer is generally marked by the publication, through Guidon Games, of three Gygax titles early in 1971, including Chainmail. In the preceding few years, however, Gygax had released a number of games which reached the wargaming community through less professional channels such as his first gaming venture, Gystaff Enterprises. Some were stand-alone titles, others were revisions of prior efforts, and still others were variants of existing games. Since the exact nature and order of these titles has been a subject of some confusion for historians, the following list sheds light on the early works of Gary Gygax.

The Source of the Chainmail Cover Art

It is widely known that much of the art that graced games of the 1960s and 1970s derived from prior sources. The original cover of Dungeons & Dragons came from a panel of the comic book Strange Tales #167 (which I reproduce in Playing at the World). Don Lowry, who published the Guidon Games line of rules and frequently provided cover illustrations for the International Wargamer, also drew on pre-existing pictures: as we see here in perhaps his single most famous drawing, the cover of Chainmail. The original appeared on page 114 of Jack Coggins's self-illustrated The Fighting Man (1966), at the start of the chapter "Crescent and Cross" about the Crusades. Gygax mentions this volume in Domesday Book #7.

Armor Class in Chainmail

The man-to-man combat system of Chainmail contains a number of elements that anticipate but differ from  Dungeons & Dragons. As originally specified in the first edition of Chainmail, the chance to hit in combat depended upon both the sort of weapon used by the attacker and the type of armor worn by the defender. This led to an accuracy system that may seem counterintuitive in hindsight - a halberd, for example, is less effective against a target in no armor than it is against one attired in chainmail, presumably because the unencumbered defender can dodge more easily. When Gygax added a table for bowshot in the August 1971 issue of the International Wargamer (about four months after first edition Chainmail), he provided a more recognizable precursor to the Dungeons & Dragons concept of armor class. This same table would eventually turn up in the second and subsequent editions of Chainmail.