In case you missed it, Gary Gygax- one of the creators of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and therefore one of the fathers of hobby gaming as a whole- passed away after coping with several years of ill health. He was 70 years old, and probably the only hobby gaming figure known enough to the mainstream to warrant a FUTURAMA reference. If you’re reading this column either as a video gamer or a board gamer, you owe a substantial portion of what you do for fun to this man. Everyone who has ever rolled a polyhedral dice, played a fantasy board game, or made their way through BALDUR’S GATE has to understand the significant cultural and conceptual influence Mr. Gygax has exerted through, over, and outside of hobby gaming.

So I wanted to pay my respects here at Gameshark.com. But rather than offer tribute to Mr. Gygax by waxing rhapsodic about my first D&D character (an Elven ranger named Simon for reasons lost to history), recount the shameful fate of my twin Dwarven fighters Burzock and Morleck (a nasty incident involving some bats, Flame Strike, and a Helm of Brilliance that failed its saving throw), or regale everyone with a recap of all the slain Kobolds, Mind Flayers, Displacer Beasts, and Beholders that I’ve notched on my belt both in the pen and paper and electronic editions of the game, I thought that I would instead head down to the crypt and exhume a classic board game co-designed by Gygax. It also happens to be the first proper board game I ever bought- TSR’s immortal DUNGEON!

DUNGEON! and I have a long history indeed. It was 1982 or 1983; I don’t remember exactly when it was. My parents, being the tyrannical slave drivers they were, forced me to go with them to one of those marketing things where you get to stay in an exotic location such as Hilton Head, South Carolina for a couple of days if you’re willing to listen to a high pressure sales pitch to buy a timeshare. Some family friends, including another budding young nerd and his sister, came along and when we kids started getting fidgety my dad took us to a comic book shop. I saw the game, with the word DUNGEON! spelled out bloody letters across the top and this adventuring party getting ready to fight some goofy green monster over a pile of treasure. I thought it looked pretty awesome so I talked my dad into getting it so we could have something to do. I have no idea how much it cost at the time, but I’m sure it was well under what the game fetches on eBay these days.

All the way back to the hotel I wanted to open it but my parents kept telling me that I’d lose all the pieces if I did. My friend was one of those “good” kids who always seemed to side with parents admonished me to stop picking at the shrinkwrap. When we finally got back to the room, we broke it open and were thrilled at the gloriously crude 1980s fantasy art, the board with its garish, multicolored dungeon rooms and hauntingly yellow passageways, and the standard issue plastic pawns representing elves, wizards, and superheroes. Most gamers opening the game today would likely be very, very disappointed. Whatever happened to a gamer’s sense of imagination, anyway?

But we weren’t disappointed at all and we threw ourselves to the mercy of the titular dungeon and its denizens. My friend’s sister was a little older than us so she had rules duty and explained how to play- which pretty much boils down to “move five spaces and if you’re in a room fight a monster”. We decided on characters and since she was a preteen girl, she picked the Elf since no fairy or unicorn was available. I thought the Elf probably sucked because he didn’t look tough. I couldn’t resist the Superhero, but I didn’t really understand what a Superhero was doing in a fantasy game. My friend took the regular Hero because he was too lazy to learn the rules for the wizard spells. I don’t know how many times we wound up playing DUNGEON! that weekend, but I do remember a distinct, growing love for what I was doing- I’d probably say that my love for board games was born that weekend.

On we trudged through the rooms time and time again, laying waste to the Black Puddings, Werewolves, Blue Dragons, Vampires, and whatnot that guarded magic swords, piles of coins, and various other treasures. I remember feeling like I had really accomplished something when I won the first time and it wasn’t like the feeling of winning MONOPOLY or CLUE or any of those other kinds of games we had played before. It was a feeling of real victory, real conquest. It’s funny too because we thought we were playing a role playing game and that fueled our young imaginations to provide maybe a little more narrative to the game’s events than would be comfortable to anyone outside of a drama class.

Strangely, I never played DUNGEON! with those friends again. However, the game got a heck of workout with the neighborhood kids over the years until enough pieces were eventually lost and the game was deemed ready for the trash. By that point, I was pretty much a full fledged D&D fanatic anyway, so the idea of a simple board game with a fantasy theme was a concept whose time had both expired and was yet to come. There have been editions of DUNGEON! in print on and off over the years, but my interest in it had pretty much passed on and I sort of forgot about it, even if it was one of the seminal games of my hobby career.

Flash forward to just a couple of weeks ago in the wake of Gary Gygax’s passing. At one of my game groups, a friend of mine says, “Hang on a second; I’m going to get something out of my car.” Knowing this person’s reputation, I completely expected him to come back with A GAME OF THRONES or one of the other three games he plays almost exclusively. He came back with a copy of DUNGEON!- an older edition than the one I had first played. We had another interested player who had never even seen the game before so we set it up and played through a three player game. When the game was over, I realized that we had at no point bothered to explain how to play the game or any of its rules to the new guy- and he won. I played it again the following week with a different group and with the 1989 reprint edition- complete with hand-painted miniatures and the newer characters such as “Flennetar the Paladin” and “Phloid the Barbarian”.