Printing and Painting

Where it all started.

This is the primordial soup that the game we know and love crawled out of to take it's first shaky steps on dry land. The system itself is an eclectic mess delivered in classic Gygaxian prose (read: big fuckoff paragraphs with important game mechanics buried in the middle). It's less a complete game and more of a bolt-on modification for an existing game (Chainmail) which happens to be where you'll find most of the actual combat rules. Considering that the wilderness exploration section of booklet 3 boils down to "Use the rules and map from this 3rd party board game with our house rules", it has the feel of a very enthusiastic homebrew rather then a real product.

This game was made on a shoestring budget and a dream and it shows. The formatting is particularly challenging, even in my "White Box" version which has been revised and cleaned up from the first printings. It should go without saying, but very little love and care is put into the visual design or artwork. Important information is rarely visually emphasized, the tables are cluttered and the order and arrangement of information can cause a serious headache. Do not expect any helpful sidebars or neatly columned spell lists.

That said, the game itself can be pretty enjoyable. It does not feel like what I'd consider the expected D&D experience; it is at it's heart a tabletop wargame more than a roleplaying game. There are few mechanics or opportunities to develop your character outside of combat or sweet *sweet* looting. But even in this earliest iteration you can see the nascent ideas that really defined the game to come. You probably would find the spells, monsters, character races and classes very familiar outside of a few name oddities (Not Fighter... Fighting MAN)

Fuck the dragon entry, blow the art budget on a sultry amazon! -G. Gygax, probably.

Truthfully, its biggest sin is that it doesn't live up to its own direct descendants. All versions of the Basic rules (and their infinite OSR clones) are much simpler and cleaner, AD&D is a far more complete experience and all of them have a much better play experience at the actual table.

All in all I would say it's still playable in this day and age but definitely chore-adjacent. It will almost certainly feel clunky and unintuitive to anyone who grew up playing 3e onward and suffers heavily from a painful lack of streamlining. Later products like Greyhawk massively improve the flow of play, but it is pretty clear that this was an unfinished and unrealized version of the game.