21/05/2018 A Guide to Gamebooks for Boardgame Designers – Birmingham Game Designers

Birmingham Game Designers

A Guide to Gamebooks for

Boardgame Designers

On Christmas Day 1982, I received a book called the Warlock of Firetop Mountain as a
present and I was hooked. Over the next 3 or 4 years I bought and played a number of
Fighting Fantasy and other gamebooks. I kept the books and replayed some of them several
years ago, but recently I have become more of a dedicated fan. As more and more
boardgames inspired by gamebooks are being published, I thought it worthwhile to present
an overview of gamebooks and look briefly at some of the aforementioned boardgames.

Before Fighting Fantasy

There are a few early predecessors of the gamebook from the first half of the twentieth
century, the most notable being the Jorge Luis Borges short story “An Examination of the
Work of Herbert Quain” (1941), featuring an author whose novel is a three-part story
containing two branch points, and with nine possible endings. Another story by Borges,
“The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), also describes a book with a maze-like narrative,
which may have inspired the gamebook form. During the 1960s, authors from several
different countries started experimenting with fiction that contained multiple paths and/or
endings, contributing to the development of several pioneering gamebooks. Another major
influence on the format were early roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons and
Tunnels and Trolls. The Adventures of You series, published in the second half of the 1970s laid
the groundwork for later more popular series such as Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA).

Fighting Fantasy

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Fighting Fantasy books are adventure gamebooks, incorporating elements from CYOA books
and solitaire roleplaying adventures. They include very
simple, self-contained rules for combat, magic etc.,
usually contain exactly 400 entries, and feature black
and white illustrations. From 1982 to the end of the
original Puffin print run in 1995, a total of 59 books
were published in the series. By that time, the rise of
video games had led to an end in the gamebook boom.
Several more titles were published between 2002 and
2012 by Wizard Books and, more recently, Scholastic
has reprinted some of the early titles and commissioned
a new book. While most of the very early books were
wri en by Ian Livingstone and Steven Jackson,
including the spin-off Sorcery! series which is among the
very best of the genre from the 1980s, other authors
dominated and revitalised the series in the la er half of
the decade. The entire series is easily obtainable second
hand, although a few rarer titles now fetch high prices.
Tinman Games has also released several of the books as
PC/iOS/Android apps with colourised artwork.

Lone Wolf

The Lone Wolf series, wri en by Joe Dever, differs from Fighting
Fantasy in that the majority of the books feature the same
character and form an extended story arc. The series, which now
comprises 29 books, was originally published from 1984 to 1998.
A fan-operated project established in 1999 converted many of the
books to HTML format and revived interest in the series, leading
to republication of most of the books. You can play all of the
books online at Project Aon, while the first 10 books are also
available in a free iOS/Android app. If you prefer the traditional
paper format, then you can buy the original print run second
hand, or the republished hardbook books new.

Other Series from the 1980s and 1990s

Many gamebooks series were

published during the boom years of
the mid-to-late 1980s. Among these were the Golden Dragon and
Blood Sword series by Oliver Johnson and Dave Morris, The Way
of the Tiger and Falcon by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, and
the Cretan Chronicles. In the early-to-mid 1990s, at the tail end of
the original gamebook era, more sophisticated books appeared
aimed at an older audience. These include the Virtual
Reality books (recently republished as Critical IF) by Dave
Morris, and the Fabled Lands series by Dave Morris and Jamie
Thomson. The la er books differ from other gamebooks in their
open-ended free-roaming game play – essentially the books as a
whole constitute a fantasy land that players can interact with.
Fabled Lands was intended to be a 12-part series, but only 6 books
were published in the mid-1990s. These have now been
republished and a 7th book also issued.
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The 2000s to the Present Day

The Wizard Books reprint of some of the original Fighting

Fantasy books also included a few new titles, of which those
wri en by Jonathan Green are the most highly regarded. He
has recently published two gamebooks inspired by classic
children’s literature: The Wicked Wizard of Oz and Alice’s
Nightmare in Wonderland. In addition to the Fighting Fantasy
apps and the 4-part Complete Sagas of Fire*Wolf (an app version
of the Sagas of the Demonspawn series from the mid-1980s),
Tinman Games has developed its own series of Gamebook
Adventures including Jonathan Green’s Temple of the Spider God.
Dave Morris continues to be active in the genre, with the
interactive novel Frankenstein Speaks available as an app,
and Can You Brexit? with co-author Jamie Thomson. The three
books in the DestinyQuest series by Michael J. Ward are
considerably longer than most gamebooks with several
hundred references each. Destiny’s Role: Zero to Hero is the first
in a new series by Fighting Fantasy uberfan Mark Lain a.k.a. MALthus Dire.

Gamebook-inspired Boardgames

The first gamebook-inspired boardgame was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1986), a
boardgame version of the very first Fighting Fantasy book. In recent years, there have been
several RPG boardgames, many of them with a dungeon-crawl theme. These owe more to
tabletop roleplaying or even RPG video games than to adventure gamebooks. However,
boardgames with a more explicit link to gamebooks include:
– Legacy of Dragonholt: essentially a multiplayer
gamebook in a box with the price tag of a mid-
range boardgame.
– Escape the Dark Castle: an unabashed a empt to
cash in on nostalgia for Fighting Fantasy, this is a
short game consisting of a series of FF-style
combats, a few simple CYOA-like decisions and
some below-par black and white artwork. Even
the box is in monochrome!
– Gloomhaven: the top-rated game on
boardgamegeek is a legacy (campaign-driven)
cooperative game of tactical combat with a strong narrative aspect creating a roleplaying feel.
After each scenario, players make decisions in a CYOA style.
– T.I.M.E Stories: a cooperative game with a single scenario in the base game and various
others available in expansions. Players move around a gradually-expanding map made up of
cards, collecting clues with the aim of completing the scenario within a set time frame. A
number of a empts are normally required to do this, just as if you were playing a gamebook.
– Gloom of Kilforth: A Fantasy Quest Game: while not having any specific gamebook
elements, this cooperative game – which is perhaps at its best played solitaire – recreates the
feeling of a gamebook far more successfully than Escape the Dark Castle, and also features a
large amount of stunning full colour artwork. In this game, one or more characters journey
around a map made up of 25 cards, resolving encounters, obtaining items, spells and allies,
and gaining experience before trying to defeat the boss or bosses.

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May 21, 2018

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