The Kid Who Wouldn’t Play D&D

Christopher Clark designed his first game because his friends thought Dungeons & Dragons was weird sword-and-sorcery nerd stuff. So he made a game about cop shows instead.

That pragmatic, audience-first instinct has governed his entire career. Inner City (1982) was a crime RPG born in a high-school notebook, designed to lure people who rejected fantasy into sitting down at a table and rolling dice. Forty-three years later, Clark is still doing the same thing — finding barriers to entry and designing around them. Stuffed animals instead of expensive miniatures. Plastic army men instead of pewter figures. Candy as game components. Humor instead of lore. If somebody wouldn’t play, Clark figured out why and removed the obstacle.

Inner City Games Designs has operated continuously since 1982, making it one of the oldest small-press gaming companies still run by its original founder. Clark claims over a hundred published titles — roughly fifty are confirmed through databases — across RPGs, miniatures games, board games, micro games, and adventure modules. He has never achieved mainstream commercial breakout. He has never stopped working.

The Invention: Toys as Wargame

Fuzzy Heroes (1992) is the design that justifies Clark’s place in this ranking.

The concept: use actual stuffed animals as miniatures in a tactical wargame. Not miniatures that represent stuffed animals. The actual toys. Pulled from a child’s bedroom, dropped onto a kitchen table, and played. The game derives each toy’s statistics from its physical properties — real-world size determines Energy Points, physical characteristics determine Defensive Classification, predominant color determines movement type. Character creation doesn’t exist. Any toy can enter the game immediately.

Nobody had done this before. Miniatures wargaming in 1992 required expensive lead or pewter figures, careful painting, and elaborate terrain. Clark eliminated all of it. Dragon Magazine noted that Fuzzy Heroes was the least expensive miniatures game you’d ever come across. The concept solved two problems simultaneously: the cost barrier that kept families out of miniatures gaming, and the intimidation barrier that kept non-gamers away from wargames.

The Honest Assessment

Two research drafts arrived with radically different framings. Draft 1 scored 11/40. Draft 2 scored 22/40. The combined assessment follows the evidence: Fuzzy Heroes’ physical-property stat derivation is genuinely novel and deserves credit. The broader career is small-press, modestly reviewed, and architecturally limited. The persistence is extraordinary. Nineteen tells the truth that eleven was too harsh to admit and twenty-two was too generous to sustain.

Total: 19 points. Year: 1982.

19 points. 1982. The toybox general.

The game was always there. The audience never found it.