Back in the 80s, a kind of cybertextual novel was all the rage amongst a certain grouping of literate nerds. For someone like me, with no friends, they opened up a world of story-driven campaign roleplaying that would otherwise have remained entirely inaccessible. Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, Joe Dever – they were my dungeon masters and I have explored worlds thanks to their imaginations. We fought monsters together. We built legacies. We saved kingdoms. Once upon a time all you’d notice looking at one of my bookshelves would be a sea of the familiar green that indicated a world of Fighting Fantasy awaited. Other, more subtle shelves, hinted that all you had to do was pick up the Sommerswerd and venture forth against the darklords.
That was a long time ago though. While I still own a number of these kind of books it’s for nostalgia more than anything else. A lot has changed for me since then. Other things haven’t though – I still have no friends. I appreciate then the attempt that Legacy of Dragonholt has made to reinvigorate what I had thought was largely a dead genre –the choose your own adventure gamebook. The fact that it comes in a box is immaterial – this is closer in spirit and execution to Deathtrap Dungeon than it is to Dungeon and Dragons.
Some of you reading this may genuinely be too young to have had the pleasure of playing a gamebook, so I’ll briefly explain how Dragonholt functions. You spend a bit of time creating a character, approximately 80% of which is completely irrelevant to what will happen in the course of the game. You pick some skills (important), some personality traits (pointless), guiding principles (nonsense) and physical description (absolute waste of time). You then pick up one of the adventure module pamphlets, open it up, and begin reading.
Dragonholt technically supports multiple players, but it’s an odd board game in that it’s better by far as a solo game. In sessions with more than one player you each take turns reading paragraphs and making decisions. Given who you’re likely to have at your gaming table, it turns Legacy of Dragonholt into something akin to listening to a Margaret Weis audiobook that is narrated by your least charismatic friends. I mean, we don’t all know the cast of Critical Role. Few of us enjoy the company of professional voice actors. And if you’re honest, would you want to listen to yourself reading out hundreds of words of fantastical fol-de-rol before pausing to make a brief decision?
The pamphlet is broken up into numbered sections, each of which will terminate in the instruction for you to continue your reading from a different section. Occasionally you’ll be given a choice as to what to do, and your decisions will set you down a branch in the story. Skills that you own, or not, may lock or unlock choices. A combination of careful character design and good instincts for danger will then carry you through a story that is moulded to you.
Back in the day, you’d often play these books with a thumb lodged firmly in the page from which you just came… long enough at least to see if instant death was all that awaited you from your choice. If it did, most people would just rewind to the last choice and choose something else. Weirder people would actually start again from the first paragraph, reading over the same passages, defeating the same riddles, until they legitimately got to the branch. Me? I was a thumb in the book kind of kid.
And… that’s it. That’s the entirety of how the game works.
Gamebooks weren’t t a popular genre with everyone – I mean, how could they be – but for kids that loved to read they were an inspiration. The Choose Your Own Adventure brand was notable for how lightweight it was – it rarely put your fate in the hands of dice. The ones I really enjoyed the most though – Lone Wolf in particularly – they came with a rule framework, informed by dice rolls, that brought everything up to a new level. They reached a point where they became less about your story and more about your game.
There aren’t any dice in Dragonholt, and the result of that is, as you might imagine, things are pretty railroady once you set your foot on the track. You get a chance to hit the switch that changes where the tracks are going, occasionally, but you’ll find an awful lot of your choices end up being:
If you have the skill ‘Cat wrangling’, turn to paragraph 69
Or if you previously ate the Scone of Flibberty, turn to paragraph 120
Or if you went to a Catholic high school, turn to paragraph 8442
Otherwise, turn to paragraph 2557
This is how a lot of your choices work in Dragonholt, and it’s a bit disappointing to know that many of your outcomes are predestined, and were largely predestined on the basis of the skills you selected before you knew how the game would even work. Did you eat the sconeThat was probably the outcome of some conjunction of skills earlier in the story. Why did you even come into contact with the scone? Yeah, you probably did so on the basis of skill availability. When you’re presented with genuine choices, Dragonholt can be an absorbing game but it’s hard to rid yourself of the feeling that you’re a ball in a pachinko machine that isn’t of your own design.
Read the rest of this post here.
The Meeple Like Us Geeklist is here.
If you can spare a dollar (or more) to support our quest to improve the accessibility of boardgames, we'd appreciate your consideration of our Patreon.
That was a long time ago though. While I still own a number of these kind of books it’s for nostalgia more than anything else. A lot has changed for me since then. Other things haven’t though – I still have no friends. I appreciate then the attempt that Legacy of Dragonholt has made to reinvigorate what I had thought was largely a dead genre –the choose your own adventure gamebook. The fact that it comes in a box is immaterial – this is closer in spirit and execution to Deathtrap Dungeon than it is to Dungeon and Dragons.
Some of you reading this may genuinely be too young to have had the pleasure of playing a gamebook, so I’ll briefly explain how Dragonholt functions. You spend a bit of time creating a character, approximately 80% of which is completely irrelevant to what will happen in the course of the game. You pick some skills (important), some personality traits (pointless), guiding principles (nonsense) and physical description (absolute waste of time). You then pick up one of the adventure module pamphlets, open it up, and begin reading.
Dragonholt technically supports multiple players, but it’s an odd board game in that it’s better by far as a solo game. In sessions with more than one player you each take turns reading paragraphs and making decisions. Given who you’re likely to have at your gaming table, it turns Legacy of Dragonholt into something akin to listening to a Margaret Weis audiobook that is narrated by your least charismatic friends. I mean, we don’t all know the cast of Critical Role. Few of us enjoy the company of professional voice actors. And if you’re honest, would you want to listen to yourself reading out hundreds of words of fantastical fol-de-rol before pausing to make a brief decision?
The pamphlet is broken up into numbered sections, each of which will terminate in the instruction for you to continue your reading from a different section. Occasionally you’ll be given a choice as to what to do, and your decisions will set you down a branch in the story. Skills that you own, or not, may lock or unlock choices. A combination of careful character design and good instincts for danger will then carry you through a story that is moulded to you.
Back in the day, you’d often play these books with a thumb lodged firmly in the page from which you just came… long enough at least to see if instant death was all that awaited you from your choice. If it did, most people would just rewind to the last choice and choose something else. Weirder people would actually start again from the first paragraph, reading over the same passages, defeating the same riddles, until they legitimately got to the branch. Me? I was a thumb in the book kind of kid.
And… that’s it. That’s the entirety of how the game works.
Gamebooks weren’t t a popular genre with everyone – I mean, how could they be – but for kids that loved to read they were an inspiration. The Choose Your Own Adventure brand was notable for how lightweight it was – it rarely put your fate in the hands of dice. The ones I really enjoyed the most though – Lone Wolf in particularly – they came with a rule framework, informed by dice rolls, that brought everything up to a new level. They reached a point where they became less about your story and more about your game.
There aren’t any dice in Dragonholt, and the result of that is, as you might imagine, things are pretty railroady once you set your foot on the track. You get a chance to hit the switch that changes where the tracks are going, occasionally, but you’ll find an awful lot of your choices end up being:
If you have the skill ‘Cat wrangling’, turn to paragraph 69
Or if you previously ate the Scone of Flibberty, turn to paragraph 120
Or if you went to a Catholic high school, turn to paragraph 8442
Otherwise, turn to paragraph 2557
This is how a lot of your choices work in Dragonholt, and it’s a bit disappointing to know that many of your outcomes are predestined, and were largely predestined on the basis of the skills you selected before you knew how the game would even work. Did you eat the sconeThat was probably the outcome of some conjunction of skills earlier in the story. Why did you even come into contact with the scone? Yeah, you probably did so on the basis of skill availability. When you’re presented with genuine choices, Dragonholt can be an absorbing game but it’s hard to rid yourself of the feeling that you’re a ball in a pachinko machine that isn’t of your own design.
Read the rest of this post here.
The Meeple Like Us Geeklist is here.
If you can spare a dollar (or more) to support our quest to improve the accessibility of boardgames, we'd appreciate your consideration of our Patreon.