Part One ended on a cliffhanger of sorts, right in the middle of Bilbo's scary encounter with the giant spiders. CHEAT SHEETS FOR NANCY DREW THE CREATURE OF KAPU CAVE TVIn addition to trying to invent my own games built around the maps and elements of the book, I also had this 1978 Milton Bradley board game, The Hobbit Game (which, if you look closely, is actually inspired by Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings film.) With its many 3-D scenery pieces, the gameboard practically doubles as a diorama.īut my first encounter with the The Hobbit was actually a good year or so earlier, via the 1977 Rankin Bass animated adaptation, when it aired on TV in prime-time, in two parts, spread across two nights. I also memorized the Dwarvish rune lettering that is used on the maps and sleeve art, learning them well enough to write camouflaged cheat sheets for school spelling tests (a foolproof technique that I exploited for years.) I couldn't count how many times I copied those maps by hand, or made Xerox copies of them for use as props or gaming material. While I loved the book, I was probably just as captivated by the cool maps on the inside covers as the story itself. So even though the book was, by this time, over 40 years old, it still seemed very much new and relevant to what was going on in my fantasy-rich world. This was also the summer that a strange new game was starting to get attention in my circle of friends, having trickled down from older siblings and some of the bigger kids at school: Dungeons & Dragons. At 255 pages, it was the biggest book I'd read by that time. It was the summer before starting fourth grade that I first read J.R.R.
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