Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop

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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 treasure trove of nostalgia… Ian Livingstone's background with print media (White Dwarf) also shows in abundance. A minor complaint - the timeline jumps around a bit, focusing on the chapter subject more than the chronology. La única pega que le pondría al libro es que los capítulos no estén necesariamente en riguroso orden cronológico, sino que son más bien "temáticos", con lo que a menudo se vuelve atrás en el tiempo o se salta adelante de un capítulo a otro.

I feel strongly that Dice Men almost completely ignores my pivotal role in those early times, not only with conceiving the name, but also the crucial financial contribution I made in the first twelve months, producing wooden games for sale and thereby funding our fledgling business.This third party is Asgard Miniatures, Bryan Ansell’s original company, an established manufacturer based in Nottingham – and that location foreshadows events to come. 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. 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.

Like a box of chocolates, you never knew what kind of game would come whether it was Bloodbowl with a cover featuring fantasy characters looking very much like Ronald Regan and the Soviet premier or any number of science fiction based board games that ultimately morphed into Warhammer 40K. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. We began thinking of ways to be more hands-off in the day-to-day running of our company but without giving up control,” says Livingstone, clearly anticipating the best of both worlds, but the agreement that puts Ansell in charge also includes handing him a majority of the company within four years, so the “without giving up control” part doesn’t last long. They expanded to include miniatures rules and eventually they started to expand horizontally into designing and manufacturing miniatures. Excellent book on GWs early past, and a must have for fans of old miniatures ("Oldhammer"), classic RPGs, Boardgames or Fightng Fantasy gamebooks.But anyone still having flashbacks to those 14-hour sessions at a friend's basement will know what I am talking about. Pure nostalgia, although I suspect that if you aren't "of a certain age" where the names and games and atmosphere of this book are directly relevant to your life then you will find this less than exciting, and probably actually boring. In a modern world with dozens of miniatures wargames and hundreds if not thousands of board games on the market, there’s a tendency to disdain the old family board game standards like Risk and Monopoly, but those are what get the Dice Men into gaming in a big way, along with the later discovery of Diplomacy and then historical wargames. It’s all interesting stuff in its own way, and adds richness to the tale being told, but in the interests of both brevity and preserving the book’s contents to be read in their own right I am largely skipping over it.

It’s an annoyance more than a major issue, and as already stated it’s probably the best choice for trying to make sense of what the company was doing in those early days, but it can make for a slightly surreal reading experience and I suspect a more tightly-edited book might have moved some of these sections around or more explicitly linked them. Probably so too would its founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (and the oft-forgotten John Peake, though he plays a fifth-Beatle role in this story, departing the stage very early). The name continues, of course, but in terms of what the company is about, the one in Nottingham is really Citadel Miniatures wearing its dad’s suit.More likely it speaks to a culture for which the Nottingham operations were always slightly out of view; what was happening in London was the focus, because that’s where Livingstone and Jackson were. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Technology by the University of Abertay Dundee in 2000, and in 2002 received the BAFTA Special Award for his outstanding contribution to the interactive entertainment industry.