To play Dungeons and Dragons is to be enchanted by it, at least if you ask the game's many celebrity fans. During a "Late Show" episode in August, Stephen Colbert pulled Anderson Cooper down a D&D wormhole to discuss their childhood characters - a female witch (Colbert) and an elf thief (Cooper). Vin Diesel has cast no aspersions on the fact he enjoyed casting spells and rolling dice. Drew Barrymore plays the game, as does "Game of Thrones" showrunner D.B. Weiss, as do an estimated 20 million people around the world. Its brand of unplugged high fantasy has provided a creative outlet and tabletop escapism to after-school students and prison inmates alike.

Dungeons and Dragons' ubiquity now includes the National Museum of Play, in Rochester, N.Y. The museum inducted the game into the Toy Hall of Fame on Thursday, where it joined bicycles, chess, G.I. Joe, Lego bricks, Monopoly and 56 other toys. Though Care Bears and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots failed to make the cut, Fisher-Price's Little People sets and the swing rounded out other 2016 inductees.

"More than any other game, Dungeons and Dragons paved the way for older children and adults to experience imaginative play," National Museum of Play curator Nic Ricketts said in a statement. "It was groundbreaking. And it opened the door for other kinds of table games that borrow many of its unique mechanics."

To players like Weiss, early D&D games honed what turned out to be marketable skills. "It was my first experience with world-building," the television producer told the Hollywood Reporter in July. "You'd see hundreds of 'what if' scenarios play out in real time as players attempted to achieve their various goals - and those goals often involved having sex with imaginary women." (One would be hard-pressed to find anyone waxing so enthusiastically about a playground swing.)