"Roger Ford, the VP of Design, was always very open to new ideas. At the end of the three days, they asked if I would be interested in working full-time as a games designer. I sat in a meeting room for three days and play-tested games, wrote reviews on them and talked through what I thought with the Vice President of Design, Roger Ford. I took three days off work and went to MB’s offices in Richmond. I was asked if I would be interested in play testing some games. We chatted, and I talked a lot about the variety of games we sold. "I explained that Games Workshop was not an actual workshop but a games store. "A gentleman from Milton Bradley – also known as MB Games – phoned the store as he was looking for some wooden playing pieces," he remembers. I did meet Steve and Ian from time to time – both really nice guys."īaker's job at Games Workshop might have been a case of the heart ruling the head, but it paved the way for bigger things – and a chance encounter opened the door to a much larger company. It was maybe a crazy move at the time – quit a steady job with career opportunities at the bank or work as an assistant in a games store needless to say, I chose to work in the game store! Games were my passion, and that’s what I went with. One of the staff then left, and an opportunity came up for me to work full-time at the store. I had a full-time job at the time working in a bank just down the road, so I would also pop in at lunchtime when I could. "He introduced me to the manager, and I began working Saturdays. "I had a friend who worked at the Games Workshop store at Dalling Road in Hammersmith at the weekends," Baker recalls. This was also the store that would eventually evolve into the Games Workshop juggernaut we know today, the company which presides over the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes.īaker during his time at MB Games UK - Image: Stephen Baker #Outset media games series#I dreamt of having a wargame table like the ones shown."īaker's dream and appetite for tabletop wargames would lead him to the London Games Workshop, founded by Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson – who also penned the wildly successful Fighting Fantasy series of "choose your own adventure" game books. The fantastic photographs in Napoleonic Wargaming feature the figures and expansive terrain of the legendary Peter Gilder. I still have all those books! The interest in wargaming also led to my interest in terrain and dimensionality. Grant’s later tile, Napoleonic Wargaming, was also a well-read favourite. I fully embraced all his rules and made a switch from primarily World War II to more Napoleonic wargaming. That book walked through how Grant developed his rules it was like reading a game designer guidebook. "He brought it home for me, and I never looked back. "My dad saw a book in the library sometime after called The War Game by Charles Grant," Baker recalls. The movement was based on multiples of 6-inches." Image: Time Extension / Damien McFerranĪt this period in time, tabletop wargaming was still very much rooted in reality – or, to be exact, past realities, rather than in a world of fantasy. You got to roll dice depending on whether you had a pistol, sub-machine gun or rifle, and so on. I would paint my soldiers, and this kind of rough play would chip the paint – so I made up some rules. "A lot of my friends would play simply standing soldiers up and then knocking them down using marbles or matchstick firing canon. "I was interested in toy soldiers and model-making from a very early age," says Stephen Baker, the British designer behind HeroQuest. HeroQuest was tabletop gaming gone mainstream, and its impact cannot be understated. Produced in collaboration with British company Games Workshop, it became something of a phenomenon and, incredibly, was sold in mainstream toy retailers like Toys "R" Us alongside the likes of Monopoly and Kerplunk. One of the games that bridged that gap and served as a gateway drug to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming was Milton Bradley's HeroQuest. Back in the late '80s, this type of game wasn't exactly mainstream and came with something of a stigma attached while Advanced Dungeons & Dragons captured the imagination of geeks the world over and Games Workshop's Warhammer line was bubbling under with fantasy fans of a similar disposition, these were very much confined to specialist stores and the wider world was almost oblivious to their charms compare that to today, where it's possible to pick up some of the most niche tabletop titles in your local high street toy store, and there was clearly some way to go. Tabletop gaming is huge these days, but it wasn't always the case.
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