Here's the story of how I'd bunked off school to play a board game and how that

board game changed my life, saying that immediately makes me excited to tell it.

I must be turning 11. I'm not yet at the bigger school in the next town where

everyone becomes teenagers and has a proper homework diary, but I'm getting there.

And my birthdays just come. My teacher is Mrs. Jackman who will be endlessly

frustrated by me because I won't focus on my work enough and my mind will

probably always be somewhere else. A stark contrast to how well I used to work

when I was younger. When I was ten, the world was a tiny place and a trip to the

town of Reading which was less than 20 miles away was like a trip to Milan. You

have to understand I lived in a village where there was nothing. The shops were

in the next town along. Cities were hours away. I didn't have a bike and I wasn't

given very much freedom by my family. Reading was amazing to me because it had

streets packed with shops, even one place that was dedicated entirely to gaming

and nothing else. It had a games workshop. A lot of my interaction with games

workshop was through the pages of its magazine White Dwarf. I looked at its

board games, its miniature games, its role-playing games, through this thing that

was as much a catalog as anything else. Most of the time these things were just

pictures on a page but a couple of times a year these trips made them real

tangible three-dimensional objects that I could touch and if I was lucky

even take away with me. I don't know about where you are but where I'm from

preteen kids don't really have any disposable income or any income. I've

talked a dozen times about how it was HeroQuest that got me into board gaming.

...