Oct 21, 2026 · 46 min · 16 segments
This week, we're looking at Dragon Strike! The Marvel book serves as a prequel to TSR's fantasy board game. Even though the game itself seems interesting and cool, the comic isn't exactly a natural 20…
Mike ThompsonHost
Jessica FrazierHost
Okay, so before we talk about Dragon Strike proper, we need to talk about a little bit of background.
And Dragon Strike was created by TSR, Tactical Studies Rules, which is the company that Gary Gygax co-founded and published Dungeons & Dragons with.
If you want to get a full history of all that, or a more in-depth one at least, you can go back and listen to our Dungeons & Dragons episodes that we did.
So after it was founded in 1973, TSR had had like a really successful decade of sales with the D and D main rule books.
However, at this point in time, basically everybody who, who wanted the books already had them.
They, they'd kind of just banked on the, on continuing success rather than like peaking and then, you know, the subsequent valley.
So because they had been operating under the belief that sales would just keep on going like they had the, the mid eighties saw multiple rounds of layoffs at the company.
And like, massive levels of debt, and then eventually things got so bad that they were over $1.5 million in debt, and its line of credit was actually cut off by the bank.
And at the same time, there were some major boardroom shakeups, but Gygax was able to still maintain ownership of the company via what I'm going to describe as a moderately shady stock maneuver that made him the company's majority shareholder.
Gygax then brought in a woman named Lorraine Williams as general manager to help write the ship.
And that said, under her leadership, the company saw a renaissance for a while.
Under her, TSR launched some of its most popular settings for Dungeons & Dragons like Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft and Dark Sun and Planescape.
And then the late eighties to mid nineties were a Renaissance period for the company.
And then in 1993, we got the board game dragon strike and, And Dragon Strike is a board game that did something pretty revolutionary at the time.
It blended what sounds like a casual-ish board game experience with storytelling mechanics of a tabletop role-playing game.
Okay, so before we talk about Dragon Strike proper, we need to talk about a little bit of background.
And Dragon Strike was created by TSR, Tactical Studies Rules, which is the company that Gary Gygax co-founded and published Dungeons & Dragons with.
If you want to get a full history of all that, or a more in-depth one at least, you can go back and listen to our Dungeons & Dragons episodes that we did.
So after it was founded in 1973, TSR had had like a really successful decade of sales with the D and D main rule books.
However, at this point in time, basically everybody who, who wanted the books already had them.
They, they'd kind of just banked on the, on continuing success rather than like peaking and then, you know, the subsequent valley.
So because they had been operating under the belief that sales would just keep on going like they had the, the mid eighties saw multiple rounds of layoffs at the company.
And like, massive levels of debt, and then eventually things got so bad that they were over $1.5 million in debt, and its line of credit was actually cut off by the bank.
And at the same time, there were some major boardroom shakeups, but Gygax was able to still maintain ownership of the company via what I'm going to describe as a moderately shady stock maneuver that made him the company's majority shareholder.
Gygax then brought in a woman named Lorraine Williams as general manager to help write the ship.
And that said, under her leadership, the company saw a renaissance for a while.
Under her, TSR launched some of its most popular settings for Dungeons & Dragons like Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft and Dark Sun and Planescape.
And then the late eighties to mid nineties were a Renaissance period for the company.
And then in 1993, we got the board game dragon strike and, And Dragon Strike is a board game that did something pretty revolutionary at the time.
It blended what sounds like a casual-ish board game experience with storytelling mechanics of a tabletop role-playing game.
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