My adventure into the origins of Dungeons & Dragons began at Bemelmans Bar on East Seventy-Sixth Street in Manhattan. It’s an upscale Art Deco cocktail lounge: brown leather banquettes, black granite bar, twenty-four-karat-gold-leaf-covered ceiling, and a mural painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the classic Madeline children’s books. It is, in other words, almost entirely unlike Chaucer’s Tabard Inn or Tolkien’s Prancing Pony. But it’s also just a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the perfect place for a drink before seeing some of the primitive progenitors of Dungeons & Dragons.
Fantasy role-playing games were born in the 1970s, but you might trace their family tree back half a billion years. At some point in the Paleozoic era, a frisky invertebrate picked up a shell and passed it idly from tentacle to tentacle, thus becoming the first living creature on earth to engage in voluntary recreational activity, or play. (To be fair, definitions of “play” vary wildly, but I’m crediting its invention to the cephalopods, because octopuses are cool. Besides, scientists have pretty clearly documented them playing catch.)
Several hundred million years later, Homo sapiens appeared on the family tree. At this point, some prehistoric proto-geek decided that while play was all well and good, what it really needed was rules. He formalized play, mixing recreation with ritual and symbolism; the result was the world’s very first game.
It’s impossible for us to know the rules of that game. It might have involved pantomime or acting, something like caveman charades; if so, it left no physical record, nothing for an archaeologist to dig up and study. The same is true for hand games—perhaps rock-paper-scissors without the paper or scissors.
What we do know is that eventually people started making board games. In 1989, archaeologist Gary O. Rollefson found a curious slab of limestone in the remains of ‘Ain Ghazal, a prehistoric settlement in Jordan. Sometime around 5870 B.C., it was carved to roughly the size and thickness of a legal pad, with two rows of six circular depressions on its surface. Rollefson supposed it could be an example of mancala, a board game where players move stones or seeds through a series of cavities; other scientists dispute that conclusion.
Still, there’s solid evidence of board games dating as far back as 3000 B.C. Archaeologists found carved stone dice and an ebony board in Shahr-e Sukhteh, the five-thousand-year-old “Burnt City” in southeast Iran; it’s believed to be an ancestor of backgammon. The evidence shows that games were common in antiquity, not a rare luxury. The Bronze Age settlement of Mohenjo-daro boasted a full-blown gaming culture. Founded around 2500 B.C. in what is now southern Pakistan, it was one of the world’s first big cities, with a peak population of over thirty-five thousand people. When archaeologists discovered the site in the 1920s, they recovered numerous small objects that appeared to be board game pieces, including six-sided and four-sided dice, and a variety of carved stone “gamemen”—playing pieces quite similar to the tokens you’d find in a box of Parcheesi or Clue.
All considered, nearly one out of every ten artifacts recovered from the site is related to gaming, according to archaeologist Elke Rogersdotter, proving games were already an important part of people’s everyday lives more than four thousand years ago.1
My trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was to see one of the most famous games in antiquity. In a long gallery in the Egyptian wing, just steps from the Great Hall, there’s a modern facsimile of a painting discovered in the tomb of Nefertari, the wife of Ramesses the Great. It depicts the queen seated in front of a table, upon which rests an assortment of carved game pieces. Hieroglyphic captions identify her opponent as Fate.
Nefertari is playing a popular Egyptian board game known as senet, which set two players to race their playing pieces around thirty squares on a rectangular board. Senet was known as the “game of passing” and came to symbolize the journey of the dead into the afterlife. It was often placed in the graves of pharaohs and their families; Howard Carter found an elaborately carved senet board in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, dating to around 1323 B.C.
Standing in front of the painting, I imagined myself seated at Nefertari’s table and that one of the playing pieces was a miniature figure of a man in silver plate armor, holding a heavy flanged mace. Even though we’re separated by 3,200 years of history, I knew what she was feeling. The game allowed her to consider her own mortality and vicariously experience the thrill of cheating death.
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A key reason why board games spread across the globe is that they’re more than simple fun. They teach and tell stories.
Consider the ancient folk tale about a queen who had one son, her only heir. When he died in battle, the queen’s counselors could not decide how to break the news to her, so they sought the advice of Qaflan, a great philosopher. He pondered the problem and then summoned a craftsman.
“Take two kinds of wood, one light, one dark,” the wise man ordered. “From each, carve identical sets of sixteen small figurines.”
When the job was done, he gave more instructions. “Take a square of tanned leather and etch the surface with lines, making sixty-four smaller squares.”
When that was finished, the wise man arranged the figurines on the leather. “This is war without bloodshed,” he told a disciple, and then explained the rules of a game—one played on a board, with two armies of sixteen figures.
Word spread about the new game, and eventually the queen visited Qaflan, seeking a demonstration. She studied intently as the wise man and his student traded pieces.
When the game was over, the queen understood its meaning and turned to the wise man. “My son is dead,” she told him.
* * *
That game, of course, was chess, or something like it. The mother of all board games was probably invented in India, though it may have been based on earlier games that made their way west on the Silk Road from China.
While the game’s true origin may be lost, the myths surrounding it make one thing clear. “Over and over, chess was said to have been invented to explain the unexplainable, to make visible the purely abstract,” David Shenk writes in The Immortal Game: A History of Chess. “The Greek warrior Palamades, commander of troops at the siege of Troy, purportedly invented chess as a demonstration of the art of battle positions. Moses, in his posture as Jewish sage, was said to have invented it as part of an all-purpose educational package, along with astronomy, astrology, and the alphabet.”
The most ancient ancestor we know of is a game called chaturanga, the Sanskrit word for “army.” First played in India during the sixth century A.D., the two-person game replicated an important battle of the Kurukshetra War using carved playing pieces—a raja, his counselor, two elephants, two horses, two chariots, and eight soldiers. It gave birth to chess; D&D is something like a great-great-great-grandnephew.
Chaturanga is the Genghis Khan of the gaming world. The Mongol emperor sired so many children that seventeen million men alive today are his direct patrilineal descendants; in turn, chaturanga has sired at least two thousand games, ranging from the Japanese variant shogi to Tri-Dimensional Chess, a real game based on a prop that appeared in several episodes of Star Trek.
Unfortunately, I stink at all of them. I learned how to play chess when I was a kid but never really understood the game. I could move the pieces and occasionally defeat one of my equally troglodytic2 friends, but I had no sense of strategy beyond “Don’t lose any pieces” and “Kill all the other guy’s pieces.”
As a result, I idolized anyone who really knew the game. Chess seemed impossibly erudite, the apex of intellectualism; people who were good at it were smarter and better than the rest of us. I imagined Albert Einstein playing chess with Glenn Gould while Arthur Miller peeked over their shoulders. Even chess players’ titles confirmed these assumptions: Call someone “grand master” and I picture an elder wizard with a big white beard, not a pasty teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
My friend and fellow Forbes editor Michael Noer is a chess fanatic, and b
y all accounts quite good at the game. He’s not officially ranked, but he’s been known to run the table at Johnny’s Bar in Greenwich Village, defeating all challengers even while roaring drunk. I asked him to teach me the basics.
The next day, Michael appeared in my office with an old wooden chess clock, a bag of plastic chessmen, and a roll-up vinyl board. “Only posers use fancy chess sets,” he said, dumping the lot on my desk. “Do you know how all the pieces move?”
I scoffed, insulted. “I know the moves, Michael.”
“Show me.”
It turns out I didn’t. I understood the basics—a king moves one space in any direction, a bishop moves any number of spaces diagonally, and so on—but had no idea about conditional moves, which allow pieces to behave differently in special circumstances. The pawn, for instance: I knew that on their first move they can advance one or two spaces, on subsequent moves they only advance one, and they can only attack the two spaces diagonally ahead of them. But I didn’t know about en passant capture. If a pawn’s initial move carries it past an enemy pawn, the enemy can attack backward “in passing,” taking the piece from behind. I learned this one the hard way, when Michael took my queen’s pawn on the sixth move of the game. I was defeated in about two minutes.
We reset the board and tried again. Michael began by moving his king’s pawn up two spaces. I selected a pawn at random, the one in front of my queen’s bishop, and moved it forward two spaces.
Michael scoffed. “You wanna play Sicilian? You wanna be a little bitch? I was just gonna teach you something, but if you really want to play . . .”
“I don’t know what Sicilian is.”
“The Sicilian Defense. It’s actually a great opening, but you don’t know that.”
I’d heard of openings, but I imagined them as complex battle scenarios requiring the memorization of dozens of moves. Openings are why I’d been intimidated by chess: When I hear “Sicilian Defense” I think of the scene in the movie WarGames when a military supercomputer simulates hundreds of variations of global thermonuclear war. Their names flash across the huge NORAD monitors: CZECH OPTION. MONGOLIAN THRUST. DENMARK MASSIVE. SUDAN SURPRISE.
But it turns out the Sicilian Defense is as simple as it gets: Two pawns, two moves, two spaces. It’s not a heavily choreographed war plan, it’s just a smart way to begin a match—the equivalent of choosing the center square in a game of tic-tac-toe.
Of course, there are lots of openings, some of them much more complex. But none of them require rote execution. “The reason why you learn them is not to play the same way every time,” Michael said. “They teach you how the game develops, to understand the principles. You start a game with an opening, but you don’t have to memorize every possible response. Ideally, it’s just you and me and a battle of wits, and there’s nothing you can memorize.”
He picked up one of his knights and hopped it forward over a pawn. “See these four squares?” he asked, pointing to the center of the grid. “The board is a mountain. This is the peak of the mountain. You are always going for these four squares.” He took one of my knights and mirrored his move, and then took his own bishop and slashed it across the board.
“That’s the Spanish Game. For the next hundred years or until you get good, whichever comes first, play that opening. With this, I can teach you how to beat ninety-five percent of all chess players.”
Over the next four days Michael gave me a dozen ten-minute lessons, popping in my office whenever he felt the need to procrastinate. I spent my free time browsing YouTube videos of common openings—the Giuoco Piano, the King’s Gambit, the Dragon Variation. And before long, I reached a critical realization: Despite its origins, chess isn’t a war game, and the goal isn’t to kill all of the other guy’s pieces. It’s a space game, and the goal is to control the board. War without bloodshed.
Then I got cocky and decided to put my new understanding to the test. I challenged Michael to a real match: No advice, no holding back. I knew I would lose but thought I could put up a respectable fight.
Afterward, I asked Michael for an appraisal. He was blunt. “Your game has improved significantly. But you still fucking suck.”
* * *
Today’s chess players use essentially the same rules as their counterparts in the fifteenth century. But chess didn’t stop evolving in the Middle Ages. Over the following centuries, hundreds of chess variants were created in attempts to modernize the game and return it to its roots as a battlefield simulation. In 1664, Christopher Weikhmann of Ulm, Germany, created Kőenigsspiel, the King’s Game, boasting that it would “furnish anyone who studied it properly a compendium of the most useful military and political principles.” Weikhmann increased the number of pieces on each side to thirty, replacing antiquated knights and bishops with then-modern military units like halberdiers, marshals, and couriers. He also created variant rules for up to eight players, expanding the board to more than five hundred squares.
In 1780, Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, “master of pages” in the court of the Duke of Brunswick, went even further. His “war chess” board consisted of more than 1,600 squares, each color-coded to indicate terrain: white for level ground, green for marshes, blue for water, red for mountains. There were hundreds of pieces, each one a colored chit representing an entire military unit, including batteries of mortars, pontoon boats, and regiments of hussar cavalry. The rules became so complicated that Hellwig required the participation of a neutral third party to direct the game and settle disputes—the Holy Roman Empire’s version of a Dungeon Master.
In the early days of the Napoleonic wars, Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, a Prussian civil servant, wanted to play Hellwig’s War Chess, but couldn’t afford a set, so he developed his own version. Published in 1812 as Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers Under the Guise of a War Game, it used dice to simulate the role of luck in battle and a table covered in sand in order to model topography. In 1812, he constructed a luxurious game table using modular wooden tiles instead of sand. He presented it as a gift to King Frederick Wilhelm III. Kriegsspiel, literally “war game,” began to catch on. In the 1820s, von Reiswitz’s son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf, refined the rules further, and mass-produced the game in a box the size of a hardcover book—small enough for a soldier to carry in his pack.
In the 1860s, under Otto von Bismarck, the game became a standard training exercise for Prussian officers. When two decades of military success followed, Kriegsspiel basked in reflected glory: After the Franco-Prussian War, British generals cited it as a factor in von Bismarck’s decisive victory. Armies around the world copied the game and began using it to train their own officers.
By the twentieth century, war games were commonplace in the military and had begun to spread into the mainstream. In 1913, the British novelist H. G. Wells took his own stab at the genre, publishing Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books. The text amounted to Kriegsspiel for Kiddies: a short, simple, accessible set of rules. Wells did away with complicated boards, encouraging play on a kitchen table or bedroom floor. And he ditched the counters and markers that represented military units: Little Wars required only a child’s own collection of tin soldiers.
It was a seminal moment. Wells stripped away rigid conventions that had built up over a millennium and saw into the heart of playing soldier: It’s a game, and it’s supposed to be fun.
A pacifist, Wells was quick to distance his “diversion” from martial instruments of war like Kriegsspiel. “How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing?” he asked. “Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides.”
With World War I only a year away, Wells hoped simulated violence might help avoid actual bloodshed. “Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensi
ve game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion,” he wrote. “Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”
* * *
1. Games are also a frequent subject of ancient scriptures: In one Indian story, Shiva and his consort Parvati are playing a game of dice and ask the divine bull Nandi to officiate. Shiva loses, but Nandi declares that he’s the winner anyway. This may be the world’s earliest example of a bad Dungeon Master.
2. “Troglodyte: This reptilian creature looks somewhat humanoid . . . It has spindly but muscular arms and walks erect on its squat legs, trailing a long, slender tail. Its head is lizard-like and crowned with a frill that extends from the forehead to the base of the neck. Its eyes are black and beady . . . Hit Dice: 2d8+4 (13 hp) . . . Armor Class: 15 . . . Special Attacks: Stench.” Monster Manual, page 246.
3
GROGNARDS
I knew that if I truly wanted to understand Dungeons & Dragons, I had to first understand the games that gave birth to it. But I couldn’t just go to a toy store and buy a hundred-year-old war game: today, games like Little Wars and Kriegsspiel are decidedly out of style.1 They’ve been replaced as entertainment by war-themed video games and supplanted in education by incredibly complex simulations. Militaries around the world still use war games for training, but these exercises are usually either computerized or playacted. The U.S. Army employs game designers in the Simulations Division at its Command and General Staff College; their events look like highly moderated role-playing games, a cross between D&D, fantasy football, and high school Model UN.
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 4