In putting on +1 Sword, Ben McKenzie and Richard McKenzie are faced with a tricky question. How do you pay homage to a cultural phenomenon as long running and involved as the venerable Dungeons & Dragons franchise without making it either too shallow for the diehards or too mystifying for the greenhorns?

Their solution is to divide the show into two parts. The first is a potted history of the game; the second part sees a party plucked from the audience to play some raucous D&D.

The McKenzies (no relation, they say) take us through the history of the game. This journey takes us from its spiritual ancestor, H. G. Wells’ tabletop war game Little Wars (“A game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books”, according to Wells), through to the present day.

The whole thing is capped off with a mini dungeon crawl, where volunteer audience members geek it up in a real game of D&D led by dungeon master Ben McKenzie. In our game, our human fighter (with the assistance of our Skaven bard) successfully seduces a dragon. It is declared by our hosts to be the strangest show they’ve ever had. It’s also the most fun part of the night, which is a shame, given its relative brevity.

Throughout the show, Richard McKenzie plays the beery, tattooed buffoon to Ben McKenzie’s beleaguered dungeon master (complete with cape). It’s hardly original – and wears thin at times – but it’s not a bad conceit.

It also bears mention that the whole show takes place in the dungeon underneath Caz Reitops. +1 cool.