By the time David Lynch’s take on Dune hit cinemas in 1984, McCarthy had read the book several times over. His passion for the novel even proved to be a handy ice-breaker when it came to a first date with the woman he would later marry.

But where McCarthy’s first aim was easily realised, his second proved to be more of a slow burn. Eventually, he would build a Dune board game. It just wouldn’t be one entirely of his own making.

In 1979, Avalon Hill’s Dune board game hit shelves. Established over two decades, the company was a giant in the war and board gaming world. Famously, it had turned down a young Gary Gygax and his pitch for Dungeons & Dragons only a few years earlier.

While the colourful science fiction setting saw Dune stand out against many of the military-themed wargames that Avalon Hill was known for, the emphasis on strategy and territory control was right in line with other titles in the publisher’s catalogue like Blitzkrieg.

McCarthy managed to snag a copy of this original print run shortly after he graduated from university. It quickly became a staple of his board gaming nights with friends. That he’s held onto that copy, plus both of its expansions, in the decades since is a testament to the qualities that make it such a unique and special game.

For fans like McCarthy, the true beauty of Arrakis is laid bare in the asymmetry of the Dune board game. So many things can happen in a given match that even familiar dynamics can bend towards unexpected outcomes.

Every faction has a different take on the situation and there’s ample room for exploring different approaches and alternative paths to victory. For instance, the Bene Gesserit player can steal victory if they manage to predict the winner (and the specific turn in which they win) in advance and the Spacing Guild wins by default if the game drags on too long with no clear winner.

More than just love of the game though, it was McCarthy’s desire to learn that ultimately drove him to build the world’s first emulator for the Dune board game.

After learning C++ during the mid-90s, McCarthy was looking for a project that could help him learn the limits and capabilities of the Allegro graphics library. By this point, he had been programming games for over a decade. He’d even penned a few of his own Dune text adventures.

“I wanted to program something to learn the package and a board game was an obvious choice as all the design choices are made for you and the graphics could be scanned from the game components so I could concentrate on the implementation,” he said.

The project took about a year to come together, with McCarthy handling all the coding and his sons and friends helping test out the results. Eventually, he had a humble but robust piece of software that could support hot seat, online and email-based play.

According to McCarthy, one of the biggest challenges was building a system that could allow players to play certain cards at any time.

“This made the networking code very complex”, he said before adding that “there are a lot of ambiguities in the original rules, particularly with how the various 'special' rules interact with each other.”

Fortunately, there was a thriving community that could help clarify these things on Yahoo Groups at this time. The contributions of this group, which included both some of Dune’s original designers and the stewards of its competitive community like Brad Johnson, helped inform the way that the first Dune emulator handled the game’s complex ruleset.

As you might expect, they also became its core audience following the release. The Dune Board Game Yahoo Group fast became a nexus for those looking to get their fix through play-by-email and online matches.

McCarthy doesn’t have any metrics for just how many people downloaded and played using the emulator before 2008, but it's still hosted through his old ISP for those who want or need it. He says he was recently contacted by someone trying to use the emulator during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A little bit of port forwarding later, McCarthy was proud to discover that it still worked all these years later. Of course, the legacy of the Dune board game is nothing if not one born from perseverance.

Originally designed by Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka, this particular adaptation of Frank Herbet’s science fiction novel has an origin story every bit as distinctive as the final product.

After hearing that publisher Avalon Hill had secured the Dune license, three made a play to pitch their take on a Dune board game. The year was 1979 and they were fresh off the critical and commercial success of Cosmic Encounter two years earlier. With one science fiction strategy title under their belt, the team were keen to add another and many of the gameplay ideas introduced in Cosmic Encounter (such as the embrace of social dynamics and asymmetry) would prove just as central to their take on the war for Arrakis.

Nevertheless, they were turned away. It turned out Avalon already had a Dune game in the works. A few weeks later, the publisher called them back. That game wasn’t quite what they were looking for and they wanted to know if the trio still wanted to give it a crack. The rest is history.

Commercially, the Dune board game was a success. However, its fortunes were largely pinned to those of the wider cultural fascination with Frank Herbert’s work at the time. And as Dune mania faded in the years following the release of David’ Lynch’s film in 1984 and Frank Herbert’s death in 1986, sales quickly dried up.

That reprinting arrived in 2019, featuring fresh new art penned by illustrator Ilya Baranovsky. Baranovksy’s print-and-play reskin of the game had already become popular among longtime fans, so Gale Force Nine approached him to license it and speed up the process of bringing the reprint to market.

This version of Dune was a faithful revision of the original, with a new quick-start guide and a few minor tweaks informed by the competitive community around the game. Specifically, Eberle says that the biggest change was an outright endorsement of elements like bribery.

While the setting of Frank Herbert’s Dune and the social dynamics of a board game like this one present ripe conditions for players to play and pay off one another, the question of whether that actually makes for a better or more interesting and enjoyable experience is something that the three original designers struggled with for a long time.

Ultimately, the most diehard Dune fans settled the issue.