When Dice Were Made of Flint #1

I still have the first set of dice I ever bought. After all this time, their edges are still so sharp and crisp that I’m sometimes accused of never using them, but that’s not true. While the dice that came with many later games were of such inferior plastic that a d20 turned spherical after just a few sessions, these beauties are hard enough to stop a tank round.

London, 1978. Kate Bush was warbling about Wuthering Heights, Siouxsie and the Banshees were bopping around a Hong Kong Garden, and the Bee Gees were bloody everywhere. I was working in the City, wearing a mint-green suit with 42-inch flares (and lapels almost as wide) over a patterned shirt and a cream-coloured knit tie with a knot as big as my fist. And platform boots.

Having done a couple of school plays, I had joined a small am-dram group as a hobby. Some of the younger members were recent graduates, and had picked up a new-fangled American game while in university. It was a blend of miniatures wargame and improvised theatre, they said. Nobody won, and it never actually ended.

What?

My only option was to go along and find out what it was really about – and that is how I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons. Not the juggernaut of today, mind – no, these were three rather shabby-looking white booklets in a white box. And the dice were all really weird shapes.

Being a mythology and monster nerd to my core – something for another time – I was mesmerized. I had to get hold of this game, and I had to start designing my own dungeons. Yesterday, if possible. There was just one problem: where could I get them?

Working in London gave me a critical advantage. I found a magazine called Games & Puzzles with ads for one shop called Games Workshop and another called Games Centre. The first was in Hammersmith, which was not reachable from Cannon Street Tube within my lunch hour, but Games Centre was on Hanway Street, which my trusty A to Z directory told me was just off Tottenham Court Road. That was still a stretch, but it was do-able.

Hanway Street was a dark and narrow thoroughfare lined with dark and narrow shops. I still wonder whether it inspired J.K. Rowling’s Diagon Alley. And when I stepped inside Games Centre, it was like stepping into Aladdin’s cave.

No Monopoly or Cluedo here. Games I had never heard of – hundreds of them – were piled up in tottering heaps, while a few miniatures hung from spinners in plastic bags. But they had the dice – and they had a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. It was bigger, with a blue-and-silver cover, but it was the same game.

From that moment, my fate was sealed.