Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games

 Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games, by Samuel Sattin and Steenz, 208 pgs.

This graphic novel takes a broad view of tracing the early origins of roleplaying games, going far back into global history to trace early origins of imaginative play, improv, and strategy games. Although I would argue that the authors maybe took on too wide of a scope, I did learn a lot of interesting facts about topics I wouldn't otherwise know much about, so I can't be too upset! The illustrations were easy to understand, and they whole book was extremely digestible. 

My biggest criticism is that while this book spends a lot of time on ancient history, there is proportionally way less time spent on the history of actual roleplaying games, and contains almost nothing at all after the 1980's (despite the current boom in the genre). I think I might have liked this book better if it billed itself as being on the origins of roleplaying games, rather than a history of a specific medium that it was ultimately a little sparse about. Still, it was an interesting little book, and if you are interested in the description of the actual contents of the book I suspect you would quite like it!