(no subject)

[stormdog]

wooisme found, and brought home from a thrift store, something from my childhood today. It's the original printing of the Dungeon! board game by TSR. I already had a copy of the reprint (also from a thrift store) that I picked up because I love the game so much, but the new version always felt fake to me.

We sat on the couch together and I slowly, slowly peeled off the tape holding the box shut, marring the art on the box to the smallest possible extent. We opened it up and I looked through the contents and sort of bounced a little and started explaing all of it to her. She talked about posting it on e-bay and I guess I looked so comically distraught over the concept that I get to keep it. Of course, she gets to make geek comments in her journal about me, but that's ok. *smile*

I took the game into geekland (appropriate, no?) and spread the contents out onto the floor to sort. I have really special memories of playing this game with my family, with my dad, with my mom, with my brothers... I have such wonderful parents, to have given me childhood memories full of gaming and geekiness and, most of all, love... *sigh*

Seeing Andrea in the hall I got up and talked to her for a bit about playing Dungeon, years and years ago, and I could feel my eyes filling with tears. Heh. I get sentimental over the strangest things, I suppose.

It's not complete, but that's ok. It's playably complete, probably much like the copy we used to have, with pieces lost through the effects of time and small hands. I'm glad the copy my beloved picked up wasn't partially unpunched like the one she shortly thereafter looked up on e-bay. If it was, there's no way I could bear to punch it out, and then I couldn't play with it.

Memories, memories... Looking at the TSR logo on the box, I have fond thoughts of the couple of times my dad and I and some of my dads friends, mine as well now, went out to TSR headquarters to work out plans for the Games Library at Gencon. Some of the people I know, particularly the Dwarf, who ran the library before my dad did, knew a lot of the people at TSR fairly well. Frank Krohn, one of the guys I remember very well from the days when my parents would take me, at the tender age of oh... seven or eight I imagine, out to the College of Lake County to game late into the evening as I alternately watched, made forts out of the furniture, and made a nuisance of myself, was one of Gary Gygax's players once upon a time. Me, I never really knew any of them and I feel sort of like someone who saw an era pass by while peering at it through the keyhole of his locked door. Perhaps that sounds kind of odd. I was pretty young at the time. More than the door being locked, I guess it was just that I was too young to know how to use that particular doorknob. I just feel like that time, those people, that era, was special and magical and unique, and that, especially with everything that's happened since Magic: The Gathering, is just very, very gone. It was so strange to revisit that building, with no evidence that TSR was ever there, when I picked up daveqat from work there once.

I miss those days of hanging out at the college with all my parent's gaming friends. I think we played Dungeon! there more than a few times. I haven't seen some of those people in years. Perhaps a decade. There are names and faces made indistinct through the haze of memory that I can attribute nothing more specific to than a sense of childhood and happiness. I wonder what happened to all of those people. Most of them, I'm sure, would have very little memory of me.

My parents, and most of my family, are going to be visiting my love and I within the next few weeks. Maybe I can show them my copy of Dungeon. Maybe we can talk about the college days and I can try to put together a clearer picture of what it was like back then, both for me and for my parents. Maybe we can even set up the board and play a game. For old time's sake. For rememberance...