Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

 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...