More than 30 years later, 1983 keeps giving up new secrets. I feel like I am pretty well-versed in the weird tie-in merchandise that TSR licensed at the crest of D&D’s first pop culture moment, but I never heard of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Color & Build Castle before. This is some prime grade licensed kid stuff junk right here, let me tell you.

What we have here is a stack of stiff white cardboard that you punch out, color and fold into a castle. This is pretty dope, and I would have loved this when I was five or six. Unfortunately, not a lot of attention was paid during the die-cutting, so lots of misalignments. I feel like this is pretty par for the course of licensed craft merch for the time.

Lots of hilarious stuff here too. On the cover, I like the fact that there are two Mercions in the castle with different coloring jobs – that seems like a weird oversight for the main product photography. I love the fact that Warduke appears to be a giant. There are also a lot of generic, happy folks, including the riff on the Keebler Elves I included, which is an odd contrast to the equal number of corpses and torture equipment present in the set. I also love the idea that this is the “official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons castle.” Accept no imitations!