Dice Men
The Origin Story of Games Workshop
Ian Livingstone
With
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Well, aside from its format (overly large hardback) slightly lost and/or trying-too-hard presentation, poor typesetting (certainly choice of body copy typeface and its size) and being a tad uneven in its narration and views and memories from others, it at least covered the early years of interesting collaborations in the burgeoning role playing games world, provides a few intriguing photos of old games and shows how a lot of interest in a subject, talent and endeavour can make and establish a company.
A good passage
As far as Games Workshop collectors are concerned, one of the hardest games to find is Towerblox. Only a few hundred copies were ever produced. Promoted with the tagline ‘The Suspense Building Game’, we launched it at the 1982 British Toy & Hobby Fair at Earls Court. However, our retail customers were less than impressed and we ended up licensing the game to another games company, who relaunched it as Pisa. It, too, failed. Ironically, a similar game entitled Jenga launched at the 1983 British Toy & Hobby Fair. Jenga also failed to catch on at first and was subsequently licensed to toy giant Hasbro, who launched it in the USA in 1987 with a huge marketing campaign. It went on to become one of the bestselling games of all time with sales of over 80 million copies. We still wonder what might have been if only we’d shown it to the right licensing agent at the time.