Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop

Product Information

The Men at this time are three blokes in a flat who really, really love games, and want to Do Games as a living and are grabbing at whatever they can think of to turn that dream into a reality; Livingstone himself describes it as “role-playing as businessmen engaged in the business of role-playing games. Of note - the digital/kindle version was very hard to read as the small text from hardcover edition was scanned and could not be adjusted via e-reader. I was intrigued enough by the premise to fund it and you can find my name in the back in the list of supporters, which feels like a disclosure I should make at the start of a review like this.

There was a certain magic, a feeling of adventure, that overcame me when I walked those aisles and gazed at the fantastic miniatures. For those with either a nostalgic memory of, or an interest in the seminal era of the 70s and early 80s for role-playing games (TTRPG under current nomenclature) this is a great read. I would've loved to get even more on the decision-making process and more hard numbers on the growth of the company, but the book gives a decent picture.words (not that having pictures is a bad thing) and how much I get through when I sit down to read it. A great collection of stories about the different trials and tribulations that a group of friends went through as they struggled to grow their new business, and on more than one occasion, struggled to get a roof over their head not just for the business, but for themselves as well! For fans of the "good old days" of GW, role-playing, war-gaming, and board games, this book is a treat; written by two of the three GW founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, we're given an inside (if not overly detailed) look at GW's humble beginning as a board game distributor, to the fateful meeting with Gary Gygax, to the development of the Warhammer games. They don’t give much away at first with the operating board in place and two of “their” guys in London on there along with Ansell, but not long after it’s clear that the board isn’t working and the choice is stark. If you've come here for dirty laundry, insight into the conflicts between the artistic and commercial, or ruminations on the greater cultural significance of gaming, you're going to be disappointed.

A gorgeous chunky volume with lots of images depicting the era being described by Sir Ian taking me back to my early Fighting Fantasy days and graduating to tabletop games like Battlecars at school. Nevertheless, the book still gives an impression of faint surprise at how things went, as if events just overtook Livingstone and Jackson and the company was swept out from under their feet. Dice Men is the fascinating, never-before-told story of an iconic company which changed the world of tabletop gaming for ever.This is also a business environment alien to the modern age with no e-mail or IMs; for most of the time Ansell in Nottingham is going to be running things independently from Livingstone and Jackson in London and so by necessity he is going to be out of sight – and probably out of mind – for long stretches. The first sets the pattern, as he resigns from Citadel and is replaced for a few months before he’s asked back, with significant assurances about allocation of resources i. In 1982 he co-wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain with Steve Jackson, the first title in the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series which went on to sell 20 million copies worldwide. I was excited when the Unbound project was initially announced, happy to be a supporter prior to publication, and gleefully received my signed copy once the finished product made its way into readers hands. The focus is clearly what he has always wanted it to be – Citadel manufactures miniatures in ever-increasing ranges and volumes, and the rest of the company exists to sell those miniatures, whether by making up games for them to be used in or by marketing them or by literally handing over boxes of them to punters for cash.