Read Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who for Free Online Page B

not decide how to break the news to her, so they sought the advice of Qaflan, a great philosopher. He pondered the problem and then summoned a craftsman.
    “Take two kinds of wood, one light, one dark,” the wise man ordered. “From each, carve identical sets of sixteen small figurines.”
    When the job was done, he gave more instructions. “Take a square of tanned leather and etch the surface with lines, making sixty-four smaller squares.”
    When that was finished, the wise man arranged the figurines on the leather. “This is war without bloodshed,” he told a disciple, andthen explained the rules of a game—one played on a board, with two armies of sixteen figures.
    Word spread about the new game, and eventually the queen visited Qaflan, seeking a demonstration. She studied intently as the wise man and his student traded pieces.
    When the game was over, the queen understood its meaning and turned to the wise man. “My son is dead,” she told him.
----
    That game, of course, was chess, or something like it. The mother of all board games was probably invented in India, though it may have been based on earlier games that made their way west on the Silk Road from China.
    While the game’s true origin may be lost, the myths surrounding it make one thing clear. “Over and over, chess was said to have been invented to explain the unexplainable, to make visible the purely abstract,” David Shenk writes in The Immortal Game: A History of Chess . “The Greek warrior Palamades, commander of troops at the siege of Troy, purportedly invented chess as a demonstration of the art of battle positions. Moses, in his posture as Jewish sage, was said to have invented it as part of an all-purpose educational package, along with astronomy, astrology, and the alphabet.”
    The most ancient ancestor we know of is a game called chaturanga, the Sanskrit word for “army.” First played in India during the sixth century A.D ., the two-person game replicated an important battle of the Kurukshetra War using carved playing pieces—a raja, his counselor, two elephants, two horses, two chariots, and eight soldiers. It gave birth to chess; D&D is something like a great-great-great-grandnephew.
    Chaturanga is the Genghis Khan of the gaming world. The Mongol emperor sired so many children that seventeen million men alivetoday are his direct patrilineal descendants; in turn, chaturanga has sired at least two thousand games, ranging from the Japanese variant shogi to Tri-Dimensional Chess, a real game based on a prop that appeared in several episodes of Star Trek .
    Unfortunately, I stink at all of them. I learned how to play chess when I was a kid but never really understood the game. I could move the pieces and occasionally defeat one of my equally troglodytic 2 friends, but I had no sense of strategy beyond “Don’t lose any pieces” and “Kill all the other guy’s pieces.”
    As a result, I idolized anyone who really knew the game. Chess seemed impossibly erudite, the apex of intellectualism; people who were good at it were smarter and better than the rest of us. I imagined Albert Einstein playing chess with Glenn Gould while Arthur Miller peeked over their shoulders. Even chess players’ titles confirmed these assumptions: Call someone “grand master” and I picture an elder wizard with a big white beard, not a pasty teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
    My friend and fellow Forbes editor Michael Noer is a chess fanatic, and by all accounts quite good at the game. He’s not officially ranked, but he’s been known to run the table at Johnny’s Bar in Greenwich Village, defeating all challengers even while roaring drunk. I asked him to teach me the basics.
    The next day, Michael appeared in my office with an old wooden chess clock, a bag of plastic chessmen, and a roll-up vinyl board. “Only posers use fancy chess sets,” he said, dumping the lot on my desk. “Do you know how all the pieces move?”
    I scoffed, insulted.