By September 5, a UPI story was reporting that police “called in computer and logic specialists plus those familiar with an elaborate board game popular among college students in an effort to decode the board.” That game was “a highly complex game involving fantasy and role playing.” Bill Wardwell of the MSU police had been trying to find people who played the game with Egbert, without success. But police determined, upon comparing the board to a campus map, that “some of the locations of the tacks matched the locations of manhole covers leading into the university’s steam tunnels.” Extrapolating from that hypothesis, the cluster in the lower-right corner might depict a power plant.īut these guesses at the meaning behind the board were admittedly conjecture. The remainder of the tacks seemed randomly positioned. A single yellow tack by itself occupied the upper-left corner. After hearing complaints from the reporter that the game was totally sold out in Dayton, she was then asked to comment on the situation with the missing boy.Ī cluster of blue and white tacks formed a rectangular block in the lower right corner of the board, something that might be the shape of a room or building. Estes was a spokesperson for TSR at the time, and was accustomed to trying to explain the game to baffled reporters. Things had settled down a few weeks after the convention, and a TSR employee named Rose Estes was in the middle of writing up a piece about GenCon for a hobby magazine when she received a call from The Dayton Journal-Herald. One such student suddenly raised the game to popular notoriety during the course of a fateful week in early September. At that point, D&D had not quite become an object of mainstream notice, but the game was very popular among gamers, especially college students. Tactical Studies Rules, the company cofounded by Gary Gygax to publish the rules for Dungeons & Dragons, held its annual “GenCon” convention in the summer of 1979. This story is adapted from Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons, by Jon Peterson.
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