To be honest I have mixed feelings about these collectors markets, but Dungeon! was designed by Dave Megarry, one of the original Blackmoor players, which makes it part of Blackmoor history. Note that this is a published copy, not the handmade version Megarry made himself. I wrote more about David Megarry and his Dungeon! game here.



Here is what the Collector's Trove posted on Facebook:

The Collector's Trove Presents: Designer's Copy of Dungeon!
The Collector's Trove is proud to bring you David R. Megarry's own designer's copy of the Dungeon! boardgame still in its original shrinkwrap!

In addition to David's comp copies he received as the designer of Dungeon! he also purchased several lots of 50 sets at a time from TSR and either sold them to retailers or gave them away as giftss. He now only has a half-dozen or so left to give as gifts or to sell and this is one.

As you know, David was a member of the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA), a group of wargamers and friends based in St. Paul, MN, that included Dave Arneson, Mike Carr, Maj. David Wesley, and several others that would go on to design a number of popular wargames.

David took part in playing fantasy adventures in Dave Arneson’s original Blackmoor, a game that incorporated much of the Fantasy Supplement of Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren’s Chainmail Medieval miniature warfare game but innovated with concepts of roleplaying individual characters, experience gains, levels, and most importantly the fantasy dungeon adventure. David Megarry took these experiences and codified them in to a much more regular, but still dynamic, board game, Dungeon! in 1973.

Dungeon! is the fantastic board game that is an ancestor of Dungeons & Dragons and represents the roleplaying game in its purest form – the dungeon delve! Players take on the role of a Hero, Elf, Wizard, or Superhero and play their way across the dungeon-themed gameboard. In their explorations they fight monsters, avoid traps, and find fabulous treasures!

Gary Gygax was the biggest proponent of the game, playtesting, making modifications, creating variants, and shopping it around to various game publishers. At one point, Gary and David made an offering of the game, titled Dungeons of Pasha Cada, to Don Lowry of Guidon Games but it was ultimately decided that it would be too expensive to print the maps. Finally, the game was picked up by TSR who put it into production in 1975.

Since then, Dungeon! has been the most successful board game ever produced by TSR and is still being published to this day! It has gone through dozens of reprintings and new editions, has been translated into a computer game, and even had a line of miniatures marketed for use as pawns. In fact, in August 2012, the game’s current owner, Hasbro, put out a brand new edition of the game and in 2014 revised the game’s presentation to appeal to younger players in yet another release!

Quite the legacy indeed! Now you have a chance to be a curator of a portion of this legacy, care for it well and enjoy!

Item Starts Sunday, June 12th, 2016 at 7:25 p.m. CST/MEX

Item Ends Sunday, June 19th, 2016 at 7:25 p.m. CST/MEX

Here is the link to place your bids:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_odkw&_ssn=the_collectors_trove&_sop=1&_armrs=1&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2046732.m570.l1313.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.XDesigner.TRS0&_nkw=Designer&_sacat=0

Although it should be clear from this article, I am not the seller and am in no way associated with the Collector's Trove.

More discussion of this article.




-Havard

As Dave Arneson's group were exploring their early dungeons, the fascination of the players for these underground activities lead to new and interesting ideas being formed. I have previously discussed David Megarry's ideas for turning dungeon exploration into a commercially viable board game. In the Blackmoor games, dungeons were commonly explored more than once. This lead another player, Ross Maker, to ask about what happened to all the corpses, rusty weapons and armor left behind after a party of adventurers had waded through a dungeon. Wouldn't that become messy after a while?

So, the Dungeon Clean-Up Crew was invented. These consisted of the Black Pudding, Oche Jelly, Grey Ooze, Yellow Mold, Green Slime and others. As this older article at Sham's Grog & Blog mentions, they were even referred to as the Clean-Up Crew in the rulebooks when the monsters first appeared in 1974.


Dave Arneson was a great fan of B-Horror films, and brought many such ideas into the game. According to Gary Gygax, the Green Slime was based on the 1968 movie with the same name. As many of you will know the Black Pudding was inspired 1958 movie The Blob. Greg Svenson has previously described the time when Dave Arneson introduced this horror into the game:

"At this point Dave took us into the laundry area of the basement, telling us he wanted to see what we would do. He had us line up in our marching order. Then he turned off the lights saying a sudden wind had blown out our torches. Then we heard some screaming. We generally scattered as best we could. He turned on the lights looked at what we had done and then went back the other room, telling us that a black blob had killed one of the NPCs who ran into it. We soon found that our weapons dissolved when we struck it. Then we got some torches relit and found that we could fight it with fire. Eventually we killed it losing a couple more men in the process."

In addition to this being an example of truly experimental roleplaying technique by Dave Arneson, the seed to the idea may have been the implementation of Maker's idea that something was eating all the remains left behind in dungeons. Arneson's players were allowed alot of input into the game. A lesson worthy for generations of gamers to come.






Image Sources:
Gelatinous Cube
The Blob

-Havard

Dave R. Megarry (center) 1974

In 1964 a group of gamers in St.Paul Minnesota founded the Midwest Military Simulation Association. Dave Arneson joined this group when he was in high school. Another member of this group was David R. Megarry. When Dave Arneson  started the Blackmoor game, Megarry was one of the players. In this game Dave Arneson presented Megarry with something that fascinated the player:

"Arneson drew up the first Dungeon map for a Blackmoor adventure that was expected to run one day and then (probably) the map would be brough back out if anyone ever went there again.   We played, everyone agreed that the game had gone really smoothly, and the next day we were back out in the kingdom, escorting some merchants through the woods or whatever.  Then Dave Megarry arrived with the prototype "Dungeon" game under his arm.  He had distilled the complex, open-ended Blackmoor dungeno crawl into a simple but practical board game.  He had also identified that, by restricting the players to a limited set of options (go left, or right, or back, and not  "NbyNW for three minutes. Now can the dragons see them there or not..." the Dungeon made everything manageable.  He and Dave Arneson discussed this, and from then on, the Dungeon was where most of the action was going to take place." (-David Wesely)

In the winter of 1972 Dave Arneson and David Megarry went down to Lake Geneva to present Megarry's "Dungeon!" game to Gary Gygax. During their meeting, Arneson also ran a Blackmoor game for Megarry, Gary Gygax, Ernie Gygax, Rob Kuntz, Terry Kuntz. As most of you will know, this lead to the creation of D&D in 1974. Megarry's Dungeon! game was released by TSR in 1975. Over at the Comeback Inn forum, we have been discussing how Megarry's Dungeon and Dave Arneson's Blackmoor game may have influenced eachother.


Image source

-Havard