Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt

People have always played games, going back to the very earliest days of civilisation. Conflict of various sorts has been a popular theme, with chess being the prime example, which developed into elaborate war games used to teach strategy to officers during the Napoleonic wars. HG Wells is known to have taken these ideas and refined them into a game that could be played with toy soldiers on your dining table, and this spawned a whole hobby of painting large armies of lead figures in painstaking detail. 

Sometime in 1967 a war gamer called David Wesely ran a popular Napoleonics game called Braunstein where players were assigned an individual character to play instead of an army. Another gamer called Dave Arneson then took this idea into a fantasy setting in his invented world of Blackmoor and he used a set of battle rules called Chainmail written by Gary Gygax. Arneson shared his ideas with Gygax, and between them they produced Dungeons & Dragons, a scrappy box set that would go on to revolutionise the world of gaming.

David M. Ewalt uses this book to tell the history of D&D, illustrated by examples from his own gaming experiences, firstly as a kid and later when he returned to the hobby as an adult. He takes a journalistic approach, visiting large games conventions and even trying his hand at live action roleplaying, an idea that had previously filled him with horror at the idea of dressing up and running around with a foam sword.

The history of D&D is told chronologically, detailing the company TSR that Gygax set up, the sidelining of Dave Arneson to cut him out of royalties, the arcane boardroom battles and financial chicanery as the company experienced rapid growth and then plateaued, followed by Gygax's own ousting. TSR was eventually rescued from financial collapse by another company called Wizards of the Coast, who were in turn snapped up by the business behemoth Hasbro. It's a fascinating story and takes us up the release of D&D 5th edition which would see a renaissance in the popularity of the game during the 2010s, the sad passing of Gygax himself in 2008 and the GaryCon convention set up in his memory.

This is a good book for anyone with an interest in the history of D&D or who wants to know what playing the game is like. The sections about Ewalt's own games may be a little cringeworthy for more experienced players but there was enough here to make it worth reading for me. 

Of course, the story of D&D doesn't end there, but that's a tale for another book.