This is also a business environment alien to the modern age with no e-mail or IMs; for most of the time Ansell in Nottingham is going to be running things independently from Livingstone and Jackson in London and so by necessity he is going to be out of sight – and probably out of mind – for long stretches.

The first is to discuss what is in this book, what’s said and what story it’s telling, and the second is to discuss what isn’t said and what story it doesn’t tell. This is the story of one middle-aged woman in a cardigan determined to understand this growing phenomenon. Initially, it was a distributor for the role-playing games from the US, principally Dungeons and Dragons and Runequest. The Men at this time are three blokes in a flat who really, really love games, and want to Do Games as a living and are grabbing at whatever they can think of to turn that dream into a reality; Livingstone himself describes it as “role-playing as businessmen engaged in the business of role-playing games. It’s all interesting stuff in its own way, and adds richness to the tale being told, but in the interests of both brevity and preserving the book’s contents to be read in their own right I am largely skipping over it.The book has many pictures and artworks, but I was really hoping to know more about Warhammer 40k, how they came up with this universe, etc. In a later chapter, Livingstone talks about his and Jackson’s agonising over the time pressure of managing GW while also writing Fighting Fantasy novels; it’s revealing of their mindsets at the time that the two men are co-managing directors of a growing retail, manufacturing, and publishing business and they’re seriously concerned by the impact on their time of writing a kind of gimmicky fantasy book, and thinking that actually the problem is the commitment of running GW. He is the former Executive Chairman of video games publisher Eidos where he launched blockbuster titles Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Hitman. I don’t think this will have particularly wide appeal, but then I’m also not sure it was really intended to. O livro é maravilhoso, qualidade ótima e item obrigatória pra quem gosta de saber mais sobre a história do hooby.

Ultimately it’s hard to escape the idea that they just didn’t want it that much, and Ansell really did. Miniatures” there means other people’s; they have been selling miniatures, but they haven’t been making them. It’s an annoyance more than a major issue, and as already stated it’s probably the best choice for trying to make sense of what the company was doing in those early days, but it can make for a slightly surreal reading experience and I suspect a more tightly-edited book might have moved some of these sections around or more explicitly linked them. Then, they started publishing their own games magazine, White Dwarf, that was similar to Dragon magazine at the time in that it was full of role-playing articles and scenarios.

In a modern world with dozens of miniatures wargames and hundreds if not thousands of board games on the market, there’s a tendency to disdain the old family board game standards like Risk and Monopoly, but those are what get the Dice Men into gaming in a big way, along with the later discovery of Diplomacy and then historical wargames. In summary, if you have any interest in the history of GW and the men behind it then this is a must read. Space Marines get just two mentions in the book – one a brief quote from Bob Naismith about sculpting the first metal one, and then a mention of the artwork on the RT cover. Beautifully illustrated and with plenty of voices in addition to the author's, this is a must for any fan of role-playing games and the FF books.