Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who by David M. Ewalt

there’s racial imbalance. Chalk it up to social differences or economic ones, but crowds inside a game convention are always whiter than the population outside, even in cities like New York and San Francisco.
    In other words: The typical game convention attendee is a middle-aged white guy. This will come as a shock to few, but it’s worth noting. Appropriately, war gamers refer to themselves as “grognards”—a French term for “old soldiers.” The literal translation, “grumbler,” was first applied to Napoleon’s elite Imperial Guard, veterans so respected they could freely complain about orders and even groan to the emperor himself.
    In the main ballroom, a few hundred attendees were setting up games on long folding tables pushed together side by side; sixty or seventy of these surfaces had been set up around the room. A historical-miniatures battle requires significant preparation compared to something like chess; there’s no set board or layout of pieces. Instead, participants build scale dioramas, usually representing the location of an actual battle. The simplest of these may be a flat tabletop overlaid with a few pieces of fabric and a handful of plastic soldiers. But many war gamers—particularly the hard-core grognards who go to conventions—strive for the detail and artistry of museum pieces. Their game tables feature tiny plastic trees, realistic hills and valleys, and meticulously painted buildings. And all of it’s to scale, usually so that the period-accurate toy soldiers are between ten and twenty-eight millimeters tall.
    For one game, simulating the English invasion of a French castle during the Hundred Years’ War, the organizers had re-created a medieval village and keep; the plastic resin castle at one end was easily four feet wide and three feet tall. The biggest display, tucked in a far corner of the ballroom, consisted of a fifty-foot-long model of the main street from an Old West village, complete with villagers, horses,stagecoaches, and dozens of buildings, including a saloon, a jail, a market, and a butcher.
    In the dealer’s room, located in a subbasement of the convention center, row after row of merchants sold the gear required to make these models. To start a game, you need a battlefield. Thrifty players can get away with a tabletop, but wouldn’t you prefer to cover that surface with a Wargames Terrain Mat? It’s a six-by-four-foot chunk of coarse fabric available in “Forest Green” and “Scorched Grass Brown” and costs $29. Of course, once you’re simulating grass you’ve got to decorate the battlefield with details like plastic trees ($7 per thicket), rivers ($8 per ten-inch stretch), and hedgerows ($12 for a pack of four). Get really into the details and you’ll want to add buildings like a one-room hut ($17) or a stable ($23). And maybe you’d like a nice old barn ($65), a bombed-out house ($80), or even a church ($120)?
    Then there are the actual soldiers. You could buy kits—a set of forty-two twenty-eight-millimeter Napoleonic infantrymen costs $29—but then you’ll have to glue them together and paint them. Factory-painted plastic figurines are convenient but costly—eight Roman auxilia troops for $16, or $2.25 each if bought individually. Then there’s the top-of-the-line, hand-painted cast metal figurines. They’re gorgeous but crazy expensive: twelve “Boxer Rebellion Boxers,” $96; twenty late-Roman foot soldiers, $175; twelve French lancers, $220.
    The need for all this equipment creates a high barrier for entry and makes it incredibly difficult for a casual gamer to get rolling. All told, a hard-core historical-miniatures gamer could easily spend thousands of dollars on his hobby.
    After checking out the dealer’s room, I wandered through the corridors of the adjoining hotels, where games were under way in a dozen hot, cramped meeting rooms. As I padded into the deepreaches, I started to feel like the kid in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, my