The Obligatory “How Did You Get Started in TFT” Thread

[tbeard1999]

I’d love to hear the legendary tales of the Old Ones here and how y’all got started with TFT.

[ecz]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

I’d love to hear the legendary tales of the Old Ones here and how y’all got started with TFT.

well, here in Sicily in early 80' there was no chance to even hear about TFT.

A friend of mine, an Italian-American that was born in NY, returned home with his family here in Italy carring the orginal game and a few gamettes (death test and others). About in 1985 he started a TFT CG with a few friends in my town. Later I met that group and, as a virus, in a few years, about in 1987-1989 almost 30 persons - in different groups- played regularly TFT.
Note that at that time D&D still was mostly unknown and nobody in our town, AFIK, played it.

BTW this Italian-American guy carried also the first AH games ever seen in Sicily; this started an avalanche. We began our golden age of wargaming.

It's safe to say that the start of quality roleplaying and wargaming here in Sicily is due to a single person, a boy 15 or 16 yo, carrying his games from the US.

[Chris Goodwin]

One of my good friends, around 1986 or so IIRC. He was also the one who got me into Car Wars and Champions. We played arena fights a lot; even played it LARP-style a few times.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by ecz

well, here in Sicily in early 80' there was no chance to even hear about TFT.

A friend of mine, an Italian-American that was born in NY, returned home with his family here in Italy carring the orginal game and a few gamettes (death test and others). About in 1985 he started a TFT CG with a few friends in my town. Later I met that group and, as a virus, in a few years, about in 1987-1989 almost 30 persons - in different groups- played regularly TFT.
Note that at that time D&D still was mostly unknown and nobody in our town, AFIK, played it.

BTW this Italian-American guy carried also the first AH games ever seen in Sicily; this started an avalanche. We began our golden age of wargaming.

It's safe to say that the start of quality roleplaying and wargaming here in Sicily is due to a single person, a boy 15 or 16 yo, carrying his games from the US.

That’s a cool story. Similar to the story of the classic wargame The Russian Campaign. Avalon Hill games were very expensive to import into Australia, so an enterprising wargamer decided to write his own version of Stalingrad. His version was so good that Avalon Hill bought it and published it in the US.

[red2]

I used to love this game as a kid, but never got to play much because all my friends always wanted to play D&D, even though of course TFT is the much better game. So I was delighted to dig it out and start playing it a couple years ago when my kids discovered my old miniatures. It is great to see what is happening with it.

[Carnifex]

Between 1978 and 1982, my friends and I use to play a variety of games in our High School Library during lunch hour. There was an early complaint that we were gambling, because we were rolling dice, but our mothers came to the school as a group and straightened Principle and the Librarian out. I have no idea what they said, but no school official ever bothered us about it again as long as we did not get noisy.

Wizard and Melee were chief among those games because they were fast and easy to play. Although, we never played it specifically as an RPG, surviving gladiators often developed personalties, relationships and drama over time. A winning gladiator always had the option to let the looser live or die. Often times this was a good way to get rid of a particularly annoying rival, but not showing mercy was also good way to not get any yourself, so it was a fine line.

[JLV]

My brother and I were avid wargamers from about 1967 on. We played everything we could get our hands on. My brother accidentally picked up a copy of Empire of the Petal Throne in 1975, thinking it was a sort of fantasy wargame. Needless to say it wasn't, but once we sort of figured it out, we had a lot of fun with it. Shortly thereafter, we acquired a copy of the white box D&D, and played that for a while, but we were always annoyed by the combat system.

In 1977, I picked up a copy of Melee, by the same guy who had done Ogre (which we both enjoyed very much), and showed it to Jim. We had a group of high school friends that played wargames (Avalon Hill, SPI, a few indies), so we tried playing a few games. Everyone agreed this was "IT" as far as man-to-man combat went, and that was all she wrote -- we were off and running.

[Jim Kane]

We were AH and 3M players, and my cousin (if memory serves) ordered Melee out of the back of the digest: 'Analog'; wherein Metagaming used to run a fairly small box ad
.

[Jackal]

Bit of a small-world story, as it turns out.

In 1979, I bought Steve Jackson's first RPG at Steve Jackson's first shop.

Yeah, the other Steve Jackson, the co-founder of Games Workshop, at One Dalling Road in Hammersmith.

Of course, I didn't figure this out until years later. Nice guys down there at GW. I wonder if I ever met the other SJ?

Cheers and thanks for the memories!

[Shostak]

My excellent big brother bought OGRE through the mail after seeing an ad in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. After having hours of fun for only a couple of bucks on that gamble, we bought the Melee and Wizard microgames. After a couple of years, we picked up the basic boxed set of D&D, the one with the red dragon on the cover, and got a dungeon-delving group going with neighborhood friends who were already seasoned TFT gladiators. But I never liked D&D's magic system, and I thought Melee had more believable and intuitive combat, armor, etc., so we switched back to TFT as soon as ITL, AM, and AW became available. Nobody seemed to mind (except one parent who had shelled out for every single hardcover D&D book for her kids). We played TFT (in homebrewed settings, not Cidri) until I bought GURPS 1st ed. sometime around '86, but by then we were all scattering off for college.