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| Image by Darren Vannoy from Pixabay |
Through rose-tinted glasses, the vague wisps of memory I have about the place make it appear as iconic as Weird Pete Ashton's Games Pit in Knights Of The Dinner Table.
Sadly the shop was demolished long ago and has now been redeveloped for housing.
I seem to recall The Dark Tower was next to - or near - a small scrapyard, as one Sunday as we queued up patiently outside, waiting for the shop to open its doors for a regular club meeting, this line of innocent proto-geeks was harangued by the clearly drunk scrapmerchant on his front step complaining that we were disturbing his rest.
Decades later Clare and I shared a house just a stone's throw away from the site of the old Dark Tower - how brilliant would it have been if the shop (and club) was still there?
I do think it's a bit of a shame that, as far as I am aware (and I have looked) there's no mention of Tunbridge Wells' old game shop anywhere on the Interwebz.
It was such a formative part of my tween and early teenage years.
As well as the site of my earliest recorded character death - poor old Gordok (well out of his depth in Tegel Manor) - it was also where I purchased my first gaming product and, subsequently, began to pick up regular gaming magazines: which, for me, in those days meant White Dwarf.
I remember 11-year-old me striding into The Dark Tower clutching my pocket money and asking for the cheapest edition of Dungeons & Dragons they had. I came out a little while later with the Holmes blue book (pictured above).
This was edition I used when I tried to explain roleplaying games to my poor dad. He rolled up a dwarf who walked down a corridor under the Tower of Zenopus (the example adventure in the book), got attacked by a spider, died and never played Dungeons & Dragons again.
The shop wasn't the only place to host our nascent "gaming club"; after a while a nearby church hall was hired for regular gatherings (possibly St Barnabus' Church Hall in Quarry Road, but, as you may have gathered, my memory is rather Swiss cheesed these days).
This venue is where Staghind had her first adventure (ie. The Crypte of The Courageous).
I also have a strong memory of sitting in the waiting room of a podiatrist in Lime Hill Road, Tunbridge Wells, reading White Dwarf issue 11.
I suspect mum had let me buy it, from The Dark Tower, to take my mind off the fact that was I was about to have a verruca carved out of my left heel.
Later, I recall cutting out the pieces of the "D&D Bar-Room Brawl" game, 'laminating' them with Sellotape, and playing it repeatedly (on my own, of course).