What Gamebooks are you Read-playing?

Back in 2018-ish I picked up some Gamebooks for the first time since I was a kid. I think I was looking into solo RPGs when I came across them again. Some new stuff over the years but the field was still dominated by Fighting Fantasy and similar older stuff. The pandemic (not the board game) I think led to an uptick in the genre. Mostly same authors still, but a bunch of new stuff has popped up in recent years. And not all of it fantasy-based, which is great.

Anyway, I thought I'd kick off a thread as some folks here might be interest in this upcoming one. The author is well-known in the genre -- I'm probably going to play his Dracula one next. But the below one is Arkham Horror investigations where you play as either Agnes Baker, Nathaniel Cho, or Rex Murphy.

aconytebooks.com/shop/darkness-over-arkham-by-jonthan-green/

Anyone else still play these?

I went thru a phase a few years ago with a bunch of these. I liked the FF Sorcery mini series the best. Fabled Lands and Dave Morris Heart of Ice were also very good.
On a little bit of a different note- the CoC solo adventures were also well done. I played Alone Against the Dark and Alone Against the Frost. I think they also put out a new one recently.

I had a blast with the Lone Wolf books when I was younger - the ones I could find, anyway. Now there's a free app with the author's blessing that includes every book written for the series and a digital backpack / combat interface. You can pay for "bookmarks" to save your place in a story.

You can also read all of the Lone Wolf books free online (or download for kindle, etc).

www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books

I think the Fabled Lands books are free somewhere too.

Gonna try and recreate the post I accidentally edited over. Ugh.

I picked up Expeditionary Company to try. Its a cancelled Kickstarter that they put out POD with downloads on their website.

huge-gamebooks.com/expeditionary-company/

Its sort of a Gamebook/RPG as it has heavy RPG-ish rules for travel. You play the owner of a company that rents wagons and security to transport cargo/people safely to other towns. So part of the game is keeping your company profitable and the other part is going on caravan journeys. You select pre-genned guards and outfit them like a party. Then travel for however many days to reach your destination while using the guards to deal with events/disasters/monsters; so that your wagon and cargo stay safe and on schedule.

Started reading EC. I wish he'd explain the rules at more of a game system level than with a prose walkthrough but it is a gameBOOK, so I get it. I did get the biggest question I had answered, which was how long it is and what ends it. Game turns are divided into months, you do 4 things (journey, quest, etc) each month, and the campaign lasts two calendar years; so 24 turns.

Outside of that, I read Cages of Fear. Or rather, I died reading Cages of Fear. That's okay. The book is very similar to Escape the Dark Castle. Except there's actually less text in the book. You get a couple pages where you escape the dungeon. Every full page after is an encounter. You roll d3 when you win a fight and go forward that many pages. When you survive until the end (yeah, I looked) you fight one of three bosses based on your character type. Then a page of exit text I didn't read yet. Its an efficient, well-thought out little book. The combat is just 1d6 verses 1d6, higher deals damage, until one of you is dead or you flee. It's fun and cheap but the combat might be too simple for a book based on just combat (again, not much text) and not skills or puzzles. Its lack of prose means its competing with simpler board/card games which is probably not a good idea but at the same time I will play it more and hope they write more like it.

A couple of useful links for y'all:

A website called "Home of the Underdogs" scanned a whole bunch of books, which you can now find on Abandonia or Annarchive .

A collection of good stuff, including Way of the Tiger, Cretan Chronicles, Fabled Lands, 2000AD Diceman, Combat Commander (set in the worlds of famous Sci-Fi novels), Middle Earth Quest, Narnia, and the fairly funky Stainless Steel Rat written by Harry Harrison himself. I also have some fond nostalgia for the "real life" series that I read as a kid and which puts you into historical settings.

Proteus Magazine.

I remember gamebooks coming up a few years back in conversation with Andy; as then, I give a strong recommendation for Kim Newman's "Life's Lottery" (although it's an interactive novel rather than a gamebook, it's incredibly good).

I livestream gamebook plays on my Youtube channel once in a while, and some of the recent ones I did were City of Terrors (the Tunnels and Trolls solo adventure), Twas: The Krampus Night Before Christmas by Jonathan Green, and some weird ones based on video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Lemmings.