Ex Carta

Given its focus on the minutiae of one-on-one combat scenarios, it is unsurprising that the first-edition rule booklet includes several sample maps. These include a fold-out two-page spread of floor plans for the Sherrifs [sic] Office and the Delta Saloon, as well as a crudely-sketched plan of the houses lining Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, site of the legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral. As with many of the original RPG publications, the simplicity and lack of sophistication of the maps and illustrations reveals more than modest production values and a limited budget. It is also indicative that the nascent RPG community had a DIY ethic: it was for the player of the game to create their own maps and a signal that what was on the page counted less than what the game ignited in the imaginations of its players.

, designed by Brian Blume and Gary Gygax, was TSR’s early attempt to extend role-playing games beyond medieval fantasy into the gunfights and frontier towns of the American West. Its simple floor plans and town sketches reflect the do-it-yourself ethos of the early RPG hobby, where rough maps served less as finished artefacts than as prompts for players staging their own dramatic showdowns.

Tactical Studies Rules was founded in 1973 by Gary Gygax and Don Kaye (1938–75) who, struggling to raise the necessary funding to publish Dungeons & Dragons, were quick to welcome a third partner, Brian Blume, on board. Blume was ‘a twenty-three-year-old machinist from nearby Wauconda, Wisconsin’ whose day job, operating a lathe for his father’s business, allowed him to ‘buy into an equal partnership with Gygax and Kaye with a $2000 investment’.

It was as a result of this financial boost that Dungeons & Dragons was published in January 1974. Kaye died suddenly, aged only 36, in January 1975, a tragedy that precipitated reorganisation of the business as TSR Hobbies, Inc. 1975 would also be the year in which the second TSR RPG, Empire of the Petal Throne was published, closely followed by Boot Hill.

It was Don Kaye who had been the real wild west enthusiast, to the extent that even his Dungeons & Dragons character had been styled as a gunslinger. Boot Hill was in part an outcome of that passion, though Blume and Gygax are the only credited authors. In his introduction to the first-edition rules, Gygax makes it clear that the game has a very specific focus: the classic western gunfight. While it is certainly a role-playing game in terms of character generation – the player operating as an individual in a world controlled by a gamemaster, and in other respects – the core of the game is unambiguous: the player’s ‘reflexes, aim, courage, and previous experience will all have direct bearing on the outcome of any confrontation which ends with smoking six guns.’

As such, the game inevitably had limited appeal and lacked the adaptability and vast narrative potential of Dungeons & Dragons. A review of the 1979 edition of the game in White Dwarf magazine included the comment that although Boot Hill might be seen as a ‘cheap, light-hearted diversion from the more ‘serious’ medieval fantasy gaming’, it is an ‘easy yet effective game’, awarding it an 8 out of 10.222 Writing in 1990, Rick Swan claimed that as ‘a tactical simulation of Western gunfights, it’s unsurpassed’, adding that ‘Boot Hill works best as a board game, where players rough out a city map on a tabletop or floor, then use miniature figures to stage showdowns.’

Title page and character illustration for Boot Hill