Double Game

                                                        RANKINGS 

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1. Darian: Master Magician - Score = 5.3   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 5

After completing the disappointing "Combat Heroes" series, I figured I would keep it going and play another two-player series that also has a solo component, only to find that in spite of having more sections to work with, the opening book of the "Double Game" series isn't all that much better. In this book from authors Jon Sutherland and Simon Farrell.........hang on a second, I recognize those names! Oh no, please don't tell me I am about to be assailed with endless strings of meaningless decisions like I was in the majority of their mostly-terrible "Real Life" series? I guess time will tell. Giving this one a fair shake though, we play as Darian, apprentice of the powerful sorcerer Gorechin, who spends his days laboring away in an attempt to help his master fulfill his lifelong dream of discovering how to turn lead into gold. Not wanting to spend all his remaining years doing this, Darian researches the legendary "Glade of Dreams", where it is said that should an adventurer sleep there and be able to survive their dreams, their greatest wish would be realized. So in an attempt to speed up the process of finding the secret of turning lead into gold for his master, Darian sets off for the Glade, which is said to lay deep within the mysterious Wailing Forest.  

Before actually setting out for the forest, we first need to set up our character. Pleasantly, character generation is not random, which I always prefer, and you begin the game with 50 points to allocate among your five stats of: Strength, Agility, Luck, Magic, and Swordsmanship. But because you are a magic user and not familiar with physical weaponry, the Swordsmanship stat costs double (ie. you need to spend 2 of your points for every +1 increase to this stat). The Magic stat is interesting too, because the more points you allocate here, the more possible spells you can have at your disposal, up to a maximum of four spells. This is important, because far and away the most powerful spell in the game is "Death Blow", which allows you to auto-win a combat. The book tells you before a fight if you are allowed to use magic or not, but there are precious few fights needed to beat the adventure anyway. Using any Magic spell (in addition to "Death Blow", you can also get "Sense Danger", "Fire Hand", and "Mind Over Matter", which all do pretty much what you would expect from their names) isn't free however, as each spell will cost you a certain amount of Strength points when cast. For the opening areas of the adventure, this makes it feel like you will carefully need to conserve your spells and plan ahead, having only a limited number of Strength points, but then the book destroys any strategizing by providing you a hard-to-miss amulet that gives you an extra 20 Strength points for casting spells, which is more than you will need. The other stats can be tested at any time, with the adventure requiring you to roll equal to or under your value to be successful. 

Mechanically, I think the book goofs up somewhat in providing you too many points to allocate, removing a lot of the thought that otherwise could have gone into it. I had my Darian character set up as follows:

Strength: 9
Agility: 8
Luck: 7
Magic: 10
Swordsmanship: 8

Pretty good I would say, especially when you learn that you can use Magic instead of Swordsmanship for some fights, and that Luck can be ignored (I was only tested on Luck once, and even in that case failure was the same result as success), so you could even safely allocate the points for those elsewhere, but you don't even need to do that. Combat works by providing a Strength and Attack score for your opponent, then having each of you take turns attempting to roll equal to or under your Attack (Swordsmanship in your case) score, and should you succeed you deduct 2 Strength points from your adversary until one of you is dead. But as stated, the "Death Blow" spell can make the whole combat process moot, at least for my character with a high Magic score. I'm not sure how much it would have mattered anyway, because on my winning playthrough I had two combat encounters, those being against a bat and a pig. Yes, that's right, a bat.....and a pig. Thrilling stuff huh? (And I found out later that even the pig could have been avoided!) 

So if the combats were so easy, and there were so few of them anyway, why did this adventure take me 5 attempts to complete? Well the answer to that would be the crappy instant-deaths scattered throughout, and every single failed attempt of mine ended in such a manner. Don't you just love being insta-deathed because you chose to investigate something that looked interesting instead of just choosing to bypass it and move on? Bah! The adventure even contains two separate 50/50 philosophical choices where you need to think along with what the authors would have done or it's game over. Not only that, but the authors have a strong "anti-greed" message going throughout the whole adventure, where you are continually admonished about your pursuit of riches instead of using your abilities to help others, and how there are more important things in life than gold blah-blah-blah, but then the choices required to pass these 50/50 questions seemed to me to fly in the face of all that. Ah well, perhaps it's for the best, otherwise this adventure might have been beaten first try.   

The lack of any interesting encounters is a serious problem with this adventure as a whole. Bats, pigs, wolves, and crocodiles are the order of the day here as you make your way through the forest and the dream world, and while they make sense considering the setting, the authors could have given us at least a few interesting scenarios or set-pieces to enjoy. Even when it appears we might get something intriguing, the book fails to capitalize on it. For instance, the most interesting thing about the adventure is when we learn that those who make it to the Glade of Dreams but then fail when in the dream world, are then replaced in the real world by whatever killed them in their dream. This is a fantastic idea that should have lead to all manner of strange, terrifying, or even ludicrous (Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?) creatures running around the forest, but the whole idea is only slightly hinted at a few times before allowing you to continue on your way, leaving this whole angle almost totally wasted. What a huge shame. Oh, and there is also a Sphinx that you encounter who poses just about the most obvious riddle thanks to the way it is worded (I was easily able to use process of elimination to arrive at the correct answer), that even your character himself comments on how obvious the answer is before you are asked to choose among the 3 provided options. Nothing like putting pressure on the reader like that! That said, the overall experience of travelling through the forest very much reminded me of playing "The Forest of Doom", where I felt I was enjoying a sunny stroll through beautiful woodland, only interrupted occasionally by the odd creature jumping out at me from behind a bush. Much like with that early Fighting Fantasy effort, I did find myself enjoying the more rustic and simplistic nature and back-to-basics feel of this journey. So much so that if I didn't know the year of publication, I would have guessed this book came out in 1983 or 1984 as opposed to its actual 1987, because it very much feels like an earlier entry in the gamebook genre as a whole.  

Now, about those meaningless decisions mentioned in my intro, are the authors doing it again here? I'm sorry to say that yes they are, although only in a few places and not nearly to the level of the "Real Life" series. I initially thought it was going to end up being far worse than it ultimately was, because right in the very first section this crap appears. As we start off into the forest, we are given the 3 options of going east, west, or straight ahead. It only took me a couple of playthroughs to discover that going east or straight ahead leads to the exact same encounter! Heck, even if you go west, it's only a slightly different variation before you meet back up to where the other two paths took you in just a few sections. Thankfully it improves after this, and there are several different ways to make it through the forest, bypassing different landmarks as you go. The authors also attempt to give you a few different routes to take once you make it to the dream world, and you can choose to either make your way through that world by either jungle, desert, or grassy plain. However, each of these routes are incredibly short (only a few sections each), and the only difference between them seems to be in what type of creature you might have to fight. There was also a bit of laziness shown within the jungle route, because at one point (section 80) you are asked if you wish to cross a river, or build a raft to sail down it. The section numbers for the two options are section 81 and section 82, and along with the decision section 80, these all appear on the same page! So you have to show some remarkable discipline as a reader not to shift your eyes slightly downward to reveal what will happen on each section. Couldn't have spread that out a bit better fellows? Additionally, there was another infuriating sequence before choosing your route through the dream world, where you come across a pit and are asked if you want to leap across it or take the ladder within it going down. No matter which of the "leap or ladder" options you choose, you are asked to make a skill check. Fail the skill check in either case, and with no penalty incurred, you are sent to.......the exact same place you would have gone had you passed the check, which also turns out to be the exact same place regardless of if you chose to leap or use the ladder! You know, I'm really starting to dislike these authors because of stuff like this. Well, I shouldn't say that. I'm sure that Sutherland and Farrell are probably perfectly nice chaps in person, and I try to keep my feelings about an author and his work separate, but this kind of thing in their gamebooks really ticks me off. At least this adventure showed some improvement in this area as opposed to their previous books, so I am trying to find a silver lining here.   

Once you make your way through the forest and find the Glade, you discover that it is protected by a large magic dragon (named Bel-gath and not Puff unfortunately, although I guess he doesn't live by the sea). And here I found the ultimate conclusion, along with our goal, to be very strange. The legendary Glade of Dreams supposedly grants a great wish to anyone who is able to survive it, which is quite the substantial reward indeed. But our character is seeking it out so that he can fulfill the lifelong desire of his master to be able to turn lead into gold. Leaving aside for the moment that we are then risking death or disfigurement in order to please our boss, couldn't we have wished for something a bit more incredible? I would think immortality, or "ULTIMATE POWAHHHH" would have been higher on the list of motivations. Even so, if vast and untold riches was the ultimate goal, why not just wish for that directly? Why bother with the qualification of needing lead in order to get your gold first? Just cut out the middle man and wish for something along the lines of a "pouch of unlimited gold" if that is your goal. I thought for sure that Darian would change up his wish at the end, but no, he sticks with the original choice. It would have been a nice twist at the end had the dragon chose to eliminate all lead from the world after he had granted your wish in a final "monkey's paw" style ending. There are some other odd moments in the story as well, such as when we encounter a blind wizard in the forest, who tells us that our quest is in vain because the secret to turning lead into gold does not exist, or it would have been discovered long ago. Yeah, I know it doesn't exist old man, that's why I'm heading to the Glade, to dream it into existence. There is also a contradiction when we finally survive the dream world at the end, and the dragon informs us that we are the first to have done it, even though the introduction of the book told us that several people had managed to do it before (but they all refused to talk about it, so maybe they were lying). This is yet another example of a book that set itself up nicely for a twist ending, but then didn't see it through, or perhaps had no desire to in the first place.  

Ranking: Not a disaster, but pretty weak. There are some nice ideas here and there that ultimately go nowhere, and the adventure itself seemed very short. The authors might not even have bothered with a combat system, and the inclusion of yet more pointless decisions by these guys is testing my patience once again, if even this aspect has been dialed back a fair amount from their other books. I did enjoy the forest setting though along with the dream aspect, I just hope the next book can do a better job of realizing some of the lost potential here. 

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2. Issel: Warrior King - Score = 5.9   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 4

On to the second of this pair of books, and I noticed improvement in just about all areas. This time we are playing as Issel, a young penniless and desperate man who happens to believe he is descended from a line of ancient kings. Why does he think this? Well, when his grandmother died she left him the "Great Seal of Franzos", which I guess is supposed to hint that he is the rightful heir to the throne. This seems to be very weak evidence at best, because even Issel himself admits that his past is a mystery to him. Still, he believes in his heart that he is the true and rightful king, and wishing to overthrow the current king of the land, the evil and murderous King Theo, Issel decides to make the trek to the Glade of Dreams in hopes of making his dream of becoming king into a reality. So right off the bat, we have a much more noble and honorable quest than we entered into with Darian last adventure, who was out for the pursuit of riches (and whose "dream" wasn't even his own anyway). 

Before setting out we allocate our 50 points again to the same stats that we had last book, with the difference this time being that because Issel is not a magic user, it is the Magic stat that costs double points as opposed to Swordsmanship. This is interesting, as even though it is not mentioned that Issel has any background in magic, he is still able to cast the same four spells that Darian could, should you be willing to spend the points to do so. Once you have set up your Issel character, you head out into the Wailing Forest to search out the glade, just like Darian did previously. The map of the Wailing Forest is basically laid out the same as it was last book, and you can explore like you did as Darian in order to find the various landmarks. I assume that the Darian and Issel quests are taking place at the same time in the two-player game, which then makes it something of a shame that in the solo game you never run into one another, as it could have been a really neat way to tie the books in together from the solo gaming perspective. But then again, missed opportunities seem to be these authors M.O. (maybe that is what they thought M.O. stands for?)

Story-wise, the first half of the adventure plays out much the same as in the first book, but once you reach the glade and enter the dream world, that is where this adventure takes a clear lead over the Darian book. In that Darian adventure, the dream world was basically the same as the actual world, with you travelling across a particular landscape and not encountering anything you wouldn't have expected to find while in the Wailing Forest. Here though, the second half of the Issel adventure is much more dream-like, where people transform into different manifestations, and where symbolism abounds. In a mind-bending moment, Issel meets his future daughter, Issella, and must lead her to safety in order to progress through his dream. We can be told later by the magic dragon who guards the glade that Issella will indeed eventually be our daughter, which implies some sort of time travelling element because how can you dream about someone you've never met? Although it is a magical glade after all, so I guess you could argue that anything goes. You then go on to defeat and kill the evil King Theo in your dream, and because dreaming while in the glade carries the force of reality, this then means that Theo is also dead in the real world. (Did he just suddenly drop dead wherever he was, Nightmare on Elm Street style? Awkward if he was sitting on the crapper). You then finally need to fight an evil doppelganger of yourself in the dream world (in a symbol of purging your own evil), and while this type of encounter I wouldn't call near as prevalent as the "one of us always lies and one of us always tells the truth" riddle, fighting an evil duplicate of yourself is still starting to become something of a gamebook trope. Once this is done, you just need to answer the same philosophical question that the dragon asked Darian, and then your dream of becoming King has been realized, and you are victoriously whisked back home. 

Overall, the combats here have been increased in both frequency and, in the case of the opening area, difficulty. In the opening area of the first book you were required to fight a Bat (or a couple of Wolves if you took the more difficult option for spending the night), while here you are required to battle either a Panther or a Boar, and then after that are forced to fight a Zombie. You are most likely going to take some damage in this stretch, so will need to make sure you have a decently high Strength score in order to survive, and for the first time in the series I found myself dying due to Strength point loss here in one of my playthroughs. I will say though, that once you make it through these fights, and if you make the proper turning in the next section, you will find yourself once again in the cave with the old man, who instead of an amulet this time gives you a Healing Potion that will increase your Strength score back to its maximum whenever you take a draught of it. What makes this overkill though is that it contains enough for 4 draughts! Thanks to this, you can power yourself back up to maximum again after every subsequent fight in the adventure, which makes this gamebook an odd case in that the most difficult sequence dice-rolling wise potentially occurs right at the beginning of the quest (which reminds me a bit of Sky Lord now that I think about it). There is a difficult fight against an opponent with Attack =10 and Strength =10 stats near the end, but if you maximize your Swordsmanship score (and once again you have a plethora of points to spend at the start, and the Luck stat I found to be basically useless yet again) you should have no problem winning the fight. There is also a way to avoid this enemy completely should you make what I thought was a counter-intuitive choice immediately beforehand. Additionally, the final combat encounter that requires you to battle your evil doppelganger in the dream world itself isn't all that difficult, but you are penalized immediately after the fight by requiring to lose half the Strength point loss you inflicted on the doppelganger (although the doppelganger has 8 Strength points, so why doesn't the book just tell you to deduct 4 points?) because "to wound your evil side is to wound yourself". This means you can only afford to take so many hits even if you win, which might catch you out should your Strength be brought low enough, especially when you are not expecting it. A bit devious there.  

A good strategy for the combats would be in setting your Swordsmanship score to 12 before you begin, which will make you a lethal warrior indeed, as you would automatically hit on every attack. That said, you are not unstoppable, as there is a rule in the series that I neglected to mention in the review for the first book (because the combats where so scarce there, I thankfully never fell foul of it), and that is that if either you or your opponent roll a double 1 in combat, it counts as an automatic kill. This stupid rule was included in these authors own previous "Real Life" series, and I hated it there, and I still hate it here. In my opinion the only thing this adds to any gamebook adventure is the possibility of incredible frustration. Thanks to the above examples of increased and possibly deadly opening combats, I would say this adventure is more difficult than the first, and the only reason I was able to beat it in less attempts than the previous book was because that in how to respond to the 50/50 questions remained the same as before, so that I answered them all correctly the first time asked in this adventure, and I also knew what to expect in regards to the layout of the forest and the best way to allocate my points before I even began.

Touching on some of my foibles with the adventure, and another aspect that makes the combat a bit more difficult, is that while you still have your "Death Blow" spell available (should you have allocated enough points to get it), I never found anywhere to use it. After playing the adventure a couple of times, I found I needed to carefully check the wording of the rules, where it states that in combat you might be given the option of using a spell. I wonder if this then became an omission on the part of the authors, where they then forgot to include it as an option for ANY of the combats. This is especially underlined when you encounter the Zombie, and are told the Death Blow spell will not work against him (because he is obviously already dead). This Zombie encounter then suggests that you can use spells in combat unless you are told that you can't, and I wonder if the authors got the two situations confused, or if perhaps I am the one confused. Regardless, I found this to be a blessing in disguise, as not using this powerful spell makes the adventure more challenging in a good way. I was also surprised to find a paragraph here that calls out those that may be playing fast and loose with where they have visited in the forest. At one point you are asked what locations you have been to, and if you respond untruthfully, you are admonished for being a low-down dirty cheater. This may have existed in the previous book also, but the only reason I came across it here was because I found it unclear what actually constituted a "visit" to one of the various landmarks. Earlier in the quest, I thought I had made it to the front gate of the City of the Forest People before deciding to turn around and leave after being warned away by one of its inhabitants. I counted this as a visit, which turned out to not be the case, and apparently I shouldn't have counted it. Did I need to actually go in? Was this even the right place? If the adventure had asked me if I had ever been INSIDE the city, then I would have answered no and never been made aware of this cheater-shaming section. Perhaps it's my own fault for misinterpreting, but still kind of interesting from these authors of all people to bait a player into such a section in any case. 

Finally, I should note that the writing itself in this book felt like a step up, with more descriptive passages and a better sense of atmosphere than the first book. I'm not sure how Sutherland and Farrell divvied up the workload here, but if they were each responsible for one book in each pair (and obviously a lot of note-checking would have been involved), then whoever wrote this adventure I would have to say was the better writer, or at least did the better job in this instance. Although I do wonder if something was missed in the note-checking, because for some reason the old man you meet in the Glittering Cave in this book is not blind like he was in the previous adventure, and I wonder what happened there. Laying on of hands? 

Ranking: I wouldn't say it's good, but this is a decent adventure, and a step up over the previous book in just about every way. I might have enjoyed this adventure more if I hadn't played the previous book first, as it gave away a lot of what was to come, but the writing here was better, the story had more interesting elements, and I needed to more carefully plan my route based upon the increased difficulty of the combats. Much like in the "Clash of the Princes" series, which saw you playing as a wizard in one book and a fighter in another, I surprisingly found the book where you play as the fighter to be the better of the two once again. The ability to cast spells gives the wizard books a head start, but in both cases I found the fighter books to have better design. So far, Issel has the lead over Darian in the standings. Time to see how Coreus and Bardik measure up.

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3. Coreus: The Prince - Score = 0.0   Tier = Broken!

Attempts before throwing in the towel: 50

You know....(and when I begin a review with "you know", there is a rant incoming), I really thought these authors had begun to see the light. The last 5 books in their "Real Life" series had some stinkers to be sure, but also a couple of keepers in book 4, Through the Wire, and book 6, Thunder in the Glens. Heck, even the stinkers were at least beatable, and not since book 3 of that series, Sword and Flame, had I endured a frustratingly broken experience. The first two books in this "Double Game" series were decently playable also, which is why this third entry came as such a shock, because the authors have reverted to providing me almost the exact same experience as that one broken "Real Life" gamebook did. The story here is simple, but does the job in setting the stage for the adventure. We play as Coreus, prince and future leader of the Hukor tribe, and the story opens with our tribe having fallen on hard times, with the only thing believed able to save us from this plight being our sacred relics of rods and a sceptre. Unfortunately, these relics have just been stolen by a thief, who has been spotted making his way towards the large city of Koragon. It then falls upon us to travel to the city and reclaim these relics for the tribe, and the adventure begins with Coreus at the gates of the city, ready to make his way in and begin searching them out. 

The urban setting that the vast majority of this adventure takes place in is highly enjoyable, and as I've said elsewhere, the city-setting has become my favorite gamebook environment. I can't be the only person who played this adventure who found a remarkable resemblance of the city of Koragon to Port Blacksand from the "Fighting Fantasy" book City of Thieves. It is a teeming metropolis of nothing but murderers, cut-purses, and various other criminals, overseen by a group of thieving despotic rulers. It even has a river running right through the middle of the city. It doesn't quite have the supernatural elements that Port Blacksand has, but other than that I find it hard to imagine that it wasn't an inspiration for the city in this adventure. Koragon here is divided up into different quarters, and you spend most of your time searching inns, markets, and shops, looking for some kind of lead on where the rods and sceptre may have ended up. You eventually do uncover a lead on the location of the rods, and you then find out that they were bought (or confiscated) by a local collector, who also happens to be one of the dastardly rulers of the city, who has them on display in his well-guarded house. So first you need to infiltrate his house, bypassing combinations of skill checks and combats depending upon how you wish to do so, and steal the rods before making your escape. Once you have the rods, they quickly lead you to the location of the sceptre (because they vibrate the closer they get to the sceptre) which turns out to be held within the city palace itself. So it's another infiltration of the palace this time, which plays out similarly using skill checks and combats, before you recover the sceptre, escape the palace, and then ride off back to your tribe. You are not quite finished though, as there are palace guards chasing you, and they must be eliminated before you can safely go back home, lest anyone in the city know where you come from. Unfortunately, I personally found this final sequence of events near impossible to accomplish. 

The problems here are almost the exact same ones that befell Sword and Flame (also book #3 in its series, just like this one. I wonder if that is just a coincidence). You are required to run a gauntlet of enemies near the end of the book with no healing indicated anywhere in between. There are 6 opponents you need to defeat in this stretch with no healing involved, and at first this doesn't seem like it's so bad, as none of these enemies have an attack score higher than 8. The huge problem is, you have to fight them in two groups of 3 at a time, and not one by one. The reason why this is a problem is that all 3 enemies in a group will get to take a shot at you in each attack round, while you only get to attack one of them. The book tries to provide a way for you to strike more than one enemy at a time by including a rule which states that you are allowed to divide your attack score up if you wish to attack more than one opponent in a round. So for instance if you had an attack score of 8, you could choose to take two attacks in a round at a score of 4 attack score each. But this just makes it more likely that you will hit nothing at all, so I'm not sure what the point is. Now, there IS a way to bypass the first of these "fight-three-guys-at-once" combats, as there is a particular magic spell that can get you past them. Unfortunately, this spell is the most expensive one to get, and in order to have it in your arsenal, you need to set your Magic score to 12 when allocating your points, and the spell itself also takes 4 Strength points to cast (which will likely be close to half your available Strength point total at the time). It is definitely still worth it to get, because you will likely lose at least 4 Strength points if you choose to fight them with your axe. Problem is, there are also several do-or-die skill checks along the way here too, mostly of the Luck stat, which means you will need to put at least a fair amount of points in there as well to have a decent chance. But because the final combat is not avoidable and doesn't allow you to use magic, you will also need a decent Attack score to boot. And don't even bother trying to win without a high Strength score either, because as mentioned, the magic spells you need to cast in order to make it past some of the obstacles here drain that stat also. In short, while I complained in book 1 that you were provided too many skill points to allocate, this is a massive overcorrection. You need high scores in Strength and Attack for the magic drain and unavoidable combat, a high score in Luck to survive the do-or-die luck checks, and the maximum score in Magic in order to cast the most important spell you need. (The Animal Empathy spell is also needed too in order to avoid the most difficult enemy in the book). The only score you can somewhat ease up on is Agility, but even this stat has skill checks, that if failed, lead to Strength point loss, and you will need all the Strength points you can get. I tried an incredible amount of different stat combinations, which is normally a great thing. What isn't so great is when it starts to dawn on you that no matter what you do, you have very small odds of actually winning. If anyone reading this was able to beat the adventure, I would be very interested to hear what stat allocation you used, and if you still needed to get incredibly lucky with your dice rolls.   

You know though what would come in handy in the battles against groups of opponents? Some kind of area-effect spell that could take out (or at least injure) multiple foes at once. And as luck would have it, one of the spells available to us at the beginning of the game is Stun Cloud, which can knock out multiple enemies. As luck would not have it however, and this beggars belief, is that this spell is never given as an option in any of the key combats against multiple enemies! Why is it even here then? Is Coreus such a clod that he never even thinks of using this? And it's not like the authors completely forgot about the spell's existence either, as it IS given as an option to use earlier in the adventure, including in an encounter where you can use it against one LONE guard! Brilliant! I will say that I think this gamebook is slightly more "beatable" (whatever that's worth) than Sword and Flame, as while I never even came close to the end of the combats in that book, here I at least got it down to the last two opponents on one occasion. But on seeing how long it took me just to get that far, I decided to try it a handful more times to bring my total attempts up to an even 50, and then after not even coming close to winning in any of those, I then decided to call it a day, as I do have a life to live (sort of). The reason why I was able to rack up so many attempts in such a short time was that after playing the book 20 or so times, I had identified the sections that contained dice rolls, along with any that contained stat adjustments, so that I only needed to reference those. (I feel like this approach needs a name. Perhaps "The Flow-Chart Method"?). 

A final note, and one unrelated to the adventure itself, but I also need to mention the cover of this book, which upon seeing it for the first time immediately transported me back to the late 1990's, as this looks uncannily like the art I would find on the boxes of many PC games I would play back in those days. Does that cover not look like some kind of early clip-art? This book was published in 1987 though, so I guess you could say it was before its time! 

Ranking: The most frustrating part about this adventure (ok, the second most frustrating), is in how much better it could have been with just a tweak or two. Even just allowing you to use Stun Cloud in the final combat would have done it. It still wouldn't have been great, but thanks to the well done city atmosphere and exploration, and the experimenting with using different values for your skills, this would have easily been in the 6-7 score range, and maybe more if the end game had been even better conceived. As it stands, chalk this up to another otherwise enjoyable experience that gets ruined due to the onerous dice rolls required to win, if even maybe not as ridiculous as some other gamebooks out there. I'd love to hear from the authors themselves if this was play-tested, and if they themselves managed to beat it. I suspect "no" on both fronts. I sure hope the companion Bardik book doesn't go down this same path, or I'm in for another long week. 

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4. Bardik: The Thief - Score = 6.3   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 4

In another big change of gears, this adventure returns to the lighter gameplay and lowered challenge level seen in the first two books of the series, but this is preferable to what we got in the previous adventure. Here we play as Bardik, a thief who lives in the teeming-with-criminals city of Koragon that Coreus visited in the last book. Unlike Coreus, who had never been to Koragon before, Bardik has apparently lived there for many years, surviving by stealing and selling whatever he can get his hands on. The adventure opens by giving Bardik the goal of.....er, well, nothing really. I can't recall any other gamebooks I have played that open with the player character not having any stated quest or mission, at least not to this degree, and has you just living out your normal life. The story opens with Bardik robbing a shop so that he can pay off some debts, which is not unusual for him. The first half of the adventure continues this way, with Bardik roaming the streets looking for things to steal and people to rob. It is only when he happens to rob the house of an artefact collector (the very same house that Coreus robs in the previous book) of those same magical rods that Coreus was seeking, that he begins to feel them strangely drawing him to find the sceptre as well, for reasons he cannot explain. This leads to the second half of the book playing out story-wise very much like last book, with Bardik first infiltrating the house to get the rods, and then right after that, infiltrating the palace to obtain the sceptre. This is far easier done here however, and the onerous combats and dice rolls have been replaced with something much more doable, with scattered skill checks and combats here and there to keep things interesting. Once the rods and sceptre are obtained (and I was expecting Coreus to appear at some point to try and reclaim them, but he was nowhere in sight), there are several different endings to the adventure that can be reached depending upon what you wish to do with these treasures. The endings have varying degrees of success, and I have to believe that the option of returning the items back to the Hukor tribe is the optimal one, as you are awarded a "Congratulations!" for that ending that you do not get with the others.

The stat allocation system once again veers back wildly in the other direction, and I found myself having more points to use than Bardik really needs. The magic system remains, but I thought it sparingly used with only the odd place to cast a spell, and even should you decide not to use magic, Bardik is fully capable of navigating obstacles without it. This makes sense though, because Bardik is clearly not intended to be a magic user, and it is the Magic stat that costs double points to allocate in this adventure. I found the stat tests throughout to be fair, with a slip up occurring at a key moment likely resulting in failure, although the combats tended to be a bit on the easier side (at one point you fight a guard with stats of Attack=3 Strength=3), and in all of my attempts at the book the lowest my Strength score ever got was 5, with all my deaths occurring due to stat test failure. And on the subject of the latter, I did notice an oddity in the book where on some stat tests you are asked "if you rolled less than or equal to your score in Agility, turn to XX", while on some other stat tests you are asked "if you succeeded, turn to XX". Don't these mean the same thing? Not a big deal of course, but the authors seem to flip flop back and forth through the whole adventure on the wording to use.     

One thing that did rub me the wrong way was that in addition to being a thief, Bardik is also a stone cold murderer. He has no qualms about cutting a path of death through the places he is trying to rob, slitting guards throats or knifing them in the back along the way. Guards who were just working their 9 to 5 jobs I might add. So, don't expect to be playing the heroic Robin Hood type of thief here. These authors have already shown in their "Real Life" series that they have no issues having the player character perform some heinous actions on their way to victory, and this adventure doesn't shy away from that either, although I suppose it's not quite as overt as in those other books. Bardik's familiarity with the city of Koragon is also a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a greater level of detail on the seedy underbelly of the city and its inner workings, but on the other hand a lot of tension that might otherwise have been created by moving through a dark and unknown city is removed, because Bardik knows the city like the back of his hand, and is on a first name basis with almost everyone he comes across, so that other than the city guards, you don't really feel like you are in that much danger from anyone. There is also an angle mentioned early on about Bardik being half elf, but I never found anywhere where this was ever brought up again. The best part of the adventure was once again the setting of the city, and credit where credit is due, the authors did a really nice job here with the atmosphere as you creep along darkened streets and investigate spooky temples. I wonder if it was the same author who wrote the Issel adventure that also wrote this one, because they are at a level above the Darian and Coreus books in terms of the writing. 

There was also one encounter that stood out here, where you can find yourself tailing a man wearing furs in the middle of the night who seems to be unfamiliar with the city, and you can attack and kill him. I think this is supposed to be Coreus, because in the previous book we are told that Coreus is made conspicuous by the furs he is wearing, which I take it to mean is unusual for the city. Playing as Coreus in that book, you can also find yourself being followed at night by thieves, which seems to line up with the Bardik side of things in this adventure. The only thing that gave me pause was when the fur-clad man pulls out a sword to defend himself, when we know that Coreus uses an axe, and not a sword. So then I wasn't sure what to think. I'm going to go with the theory that this man was indeed Coreus (which would explain why he never appears later when you are stealing the rods and sceptre that he is also after), and the author of this particular adventure just forgot that his weapon was supposed to be an axe. Oh and the cover of the book this time? C'mon! It's another PC game! Maybe I was just playing some really cheap computer games that ripped off these book covers back in the day  

Finally, just a note on my acquisition of this book, as this gamebook was one that I had an incredibly tough time in getting my hands on. While some "Fighting Fantasy" books such as Magehunter and Revenge of the Vampire are certainly hard to get as well, there is usually at least a copy or two for sale on ebay (albeit at exorbitant prices). The Storms of Chai from the "Lone Wolf" series is another very hard one to get, but at least with that one it is available to play online through Project Aon. With this Bardik book however, I went a long time without being able to find it available anywhere, but just happened to get lucky one day when searching on Amazon and managed to find one of the massive online book sellers had a copy going cheap. I'm sure glad I decided on a whim to check for it that day, as I'm guessing it wouldn't have lasted long. Still, I wonder why Bardik was so much harder for me to find than the other 3 books in this series? It doesn't seem like it would have had less copies printed than Issel, its companion book. Perhaps I had unknowingly gotten lucky on the Issel book as well years ago when I bought that one. Oh, and my second hand copy of this Bardik book had me wondering just who had played this before me, because on the character sheet at the front of the book, they had given themselves starting stats of Strength=20, Agility=12, Luck=12, Magic=12, and Swordsmanship=12, which is obviously not even remotely possible. I have come across the odd "Fighting Fantasy" book with max stats written on the character sheet, which is eyebrow raising but at least not impossible, but this is the first time I have seen fudging to this degree. I mean, if you are going to cheat and say you won every fight and passed every skill check, why even bother with the pretense of recording your stats?  

Ranking: Nothing groundbreaking, but I had a good time in my playthroughs of this. There is just enough gameplay to makes things interesting, and several different routes to experiment with. Overall I wasn't a fan of your character not having any real discernible goal, but this could be viewed as a positive by some I suppose. The setting was the strong point of the adventure for me (and has me looking forward to my next urban-set gamebook), and the writing and atmosphere here was the best in the series. 

As a whole, this series from a solo perspective was mostly enjoyable. The adventures never could quite find the sweet spot from a difficulty perspective, with three of the four books falling on the easier end of the spectrum, and then book 3, Coreus: The Prince, sticking out like a sore thumb due to the dice rolls required to win, and I am starting to suspect that either the Stun Cloud spell was meant to be an option in the final combat, or that there was supposed to be some healing taking place beforehand. If either of those had happened, I would have said it was the best in the range. As it stands, I give the top spot to the Bardik book, which just edges out the Issel entry, mostly due to the superior setting. So while not great, these adventures are far better than the solo quests that were built into the "Combat Heroes" series, but not as good as those from the "Clash of the Princes" books.