here are 15 of us crammed into a cellar beneath a nondescript house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. To the uninformed observer, there’s nothing to see down here: just two low rooms, bare breeze-block walls, a ceiling lined with pipes. Yet we’re all looking about the place in hushed awe, like tourists staring up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Gygax and Arneson met for the first time at Gen Con in 1968. Arneson brought with him some miniature ship models he’d made and Gary was impressed. The two hit it off, kept in touch and later made a Napoleonic naval wargame together named Don’t Give Up the Ship. Gygax went on to co-create a medieval wargame named Chainmail, which created rules for man-to-man fighting with armour and swords, and brought in some innovative new ideas such as superhero characters who took a number of hits to defeat. At the same time, Dave Arneson was messing about with an experimental project named Braunstein by David Wesely, a Napoleonic wargame inspired by Diplomacy.