Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop

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They’re not of the right social class for it, but the phrase that keeps coming back to me to describe the two remaining Dice Men is “gentleman amateurs. 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. You haven’t given any thought to finding anyone who could succeed him, and he knows that too, and your plan for how to keep him on side when he resigns the third time is to promise you’ll let him run the company, which is what he wanted to begin with.

And all that stuff about those fighting fantasy books - really want to revisit Firetop Mountain too now as well.Pure nostalgia, although I suspect that if you aren't "of a certain age" where the names and games and atmosphere of this book are directly relevant to your life then you will find this less than exciting, and probably actually boring. A treasure trove of nostalgia… Ian Livingstone's background with print media (White Dwarf) also shows in abundance. It's a wonderfully nostalgic piece of work, part memoir, part full-colour scrapbook, told with infectious enthusiasm and delivered with the pacing you would expect from an international best-selling author.

I would've loved to get even more on the decision-making process and more hard numbers on the growth of the company, but the book gives a decent picture. There’s a couple of hints as to why they seem so passive in letting it go; they’re overcommitted and exhausted, and Livingstone claims that they didn’t pay themselves much from GW and so the financial rewards of writing more of the now obviously-successful Fighting Fantasy books probably loomed large in the mind – why go through all the bother of the day job when someone else so clearly wanted to do it? To my understanding the book is now on general sale, but it was originally funded through Unbound, a crowdfunder for boutique publishing like this. In a matter of months Bryan Ansell has fucked off all the bits about London GW that he didn’t like, including its London location; gone is the generalist approach to retail, the grab-bag of board games and RPG licences and dicking about with video games. In the early days, the 1980-1990s, there was a subscription service where GW would send you a game a month, and it was heavenly.They started dabbling in inventing their own games too including the Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing Game.