Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

  "I bet I can think up worse curses than you can." Most gamebooks open with a page explaining what a gamebook is, and that you won't be reading it from front to back like a regular book. It is standard gamebook practice to do this, just in case the reader hasn't read a gamebook before, and each series tends to add its own little flavor to this arbitrary introduction. Crash Landing's take is to straight up tell me my plane is gonna crash, and hint at the exciting things I'll be doing during my adventure, which feels not only redundant but lazy. I already have an idea what's in store for me based on the front cover of the story called Crash Landing , with the crashed plane in the jungle. The back cover goes as far as listing page numbers and what I'll find there! That's three shades of spoilers! Let me discover this stuff myself, Twistaplot and/or Arthur Roth! Despite the bad initial presentation, Crash Landing does have a strong premise that promis...

  "This book is your passport into time." I have mixed feelings about Time Machine #7, and the series as a whole if Ice Age Explorer is anything to go by. The premise is that you, the reader, are an explorer who travels through time for scientific research purposes. In this case, we are trying to identify a weird and possibly extinct animal depicted in cave paintings, which has left contemporary scientists (for 1985 anyway) utterly baffled. Its presentation is pretty bomb, there's no doubt about that. The cover with the raging mammoth is eye-catching, and the interior has a nice balance of text and imagery to give each chapter a flourish that more bog-standard gamebooks lack.  Time Machine books also have a databank in the first few pages, which gives an educational crash-course of the time period you are about to enter; and a list of hints in the back, which you sometimes have the option to consult when you reach certain pages. I found the databank more helpful than the ...

 "All systems GO. It's awesome down here." The book that kicked off the initial gamebook craze, Journey Under the Sea puts readers in the role of a deep sea explorer who comes equipped with a special sub called the Seeker,  and an experimental diving suit designed to withstand the crushing depths, should you actually leave your sub for some insane reason. Your mission? Locate the lost city of Atlantis. Secondary mission: don't get eaten by creatures. The series was originally titled The Adventures of You , in 1976. Bantam Books changed the series title and published half a dozen volumes to kick the series off a few years later, including this volume. The rest, as they say, is history. The Choose Your Own Adventure series was aimed at young readers, and the narrative reflects this. Lots of short, basic sentences and light on immersion for an adult reader. For a young reader, though, the idea of piloting a mini-sub to the dark, uncharted realms of the deep is exciting...

 Welcome to the Gamebook Shack, where I will be posting reviews of gamebooks, talking about board games, possibly video games, and other weird stuff. I'll post updates about author events as well for anyone who wants to come say hello. What is a gamebook, anyway? Gamebooks are interactive fiction. You probably know them as "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, which is actually the name of the brand that kicked off this fascinating sub-genre of fiction way back in 1976. Gamebooks allow you, the reader, to decide what the hero does and, to an extent, how the story ends. There have been many interactive fiction experiments since the early 1940s (look up authors Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Raymond Queneau for examples), but CYOA launched the genre into the mainstream. Countless publishers jumped on the bandwagon and launched their own gamebook brands. Some were simple and straightforward with chapters consisting of only one or two pages, while others read more like s...