When I was 9 my uncle bought my sister who was 11 The war of the Ring board game. Needless to say she had no interest in it at all. I however learnt the rules and spent the next year trying to find people to play it with me.
Anyway that caused me to read LotR and when I was 10 at a party my mum was throwing for her students who were just leaving college I was talking to this guy about D&D. He lent me his AD&D books for a couple of weeks and then for my 11th birthday I bought the Blue Book.
When I started grammar school a month later I started running Blue book at school, needless to say I had fuck all idea what I was doing never having seen anyone else play a game. I actually drew my first 'dungeon' out on A1 2cm graph paper and using minis like it was a board game.
But I had it sussed in a few weeks and switched to AD&D that Christmas.

I was 11, with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks then FF RPG. Went straight to AD&D age 12 so didn't experience BX at the time, probably a shame.

I'd just started at a new school in 1985. I was 11. First day at school I made a new friend who told me about this amazing game his older brother was playing... so we proceeded to swipe his brother's B/X sets and learned how to play D&D while avoiding getting beaten up by the older brother. So many school math graph paper books sacrificed to our dungeon map imaginings. Ah, good times

Quote from: jibbajibba;748250When I was 9 my uncle bought my sister who was 11 The war of the Ring board game. Needless to say she had no interest in it at all. I however learnt the rules and spent the next year trying to find people to play it with me.

Heh, ironic -- I was just looking over my copy a couple days ago.  Heaven knows why I've held onto it all these years, because I've never actually found someone to play it with me ...

I was briefly roped into a Mage LARP in college, around 2005 or so, and while that was indeed quite brief I soon transitioned into tabletop. I was either 21 or 22, so I picked the Twenties category.

I was given Traveller Starter edn for my 12th birthday, but really got into gaming around 16 or so (WFRP1e and TMNT)

Late. I was already a grown up with a full time job and a mortgage. Everyone else I gamed with of course had been playing since their teens and had tons of war stories and a shared culture, mostly around playing AD&D, from which I felt excluded. Took me many years to get passed a sense of being an outsider in the hobby.  

I'm over that now, I've got plenty of war stories of my own but I still don't get AD&D.

I was 12, at secondary school, which is 11-18 in the UK.

I was 7 when my aunt forced my older cousin to let me and my older brother to play AD&D with his high school friends.  My brother and I quickly got the Basic D&D and Star Frontiers box sets.  By the time my brother reached Jr. High we were playing AD&D with our closest neighbors and continue sporadically to this day.

I was 8, my first game was Holmes D&D.
In 1980 my cousin and brother (at the time both 13 and already avid war/boardgamers of Avalon Hill and SPI stuff) needed an extra player to try a new kind of game from the USA.

Quote from: Ravenswing;748277Heh, ironic -- I was just looking over my copy a couple days ago.  Heaven knows why I've held onto it all these years, because I've never actually found someone to play it with me ...

Great, if flawed game
If You like enormous hex maps of middle earth its pretty hard to beat.

It was some point in the mid 80s, I think in third grade.

I want to say 1985 as the definitive year I got into gaming, with Marvel Super Heroes being the first, but I could be off by a year. I'll say I was 12.

Quote from: The Butcher;748155I was 12 years old, when I got the 1991 "black box" Basic D&D. I played through the solo adventure (each segment of the solo adventure taught a chapter of the core rulebook — best introductory product ever!) and in a couple of weeks I was drawing up, stocking and running my first dungeon. Good times.

Ditto.  I was 14, and intorduced my friends to the game.  A high school senior made me some photocopies of Mentzer Companion and Master to go with my "black box" after seeing us playing in the school bleachers.  Unfortunately, we never got to play together before he graduated.  I ended up ditching D&D for AD&D 2e a year later, but part of me wonders "what if" I had kept with the Mentzer line and/or Rules Cyclopedia.

1980. I was 10 years old and already a fan of Tolkien and Howard's Conan tales.