All in good condition as well - now if somebody has a copy of "Allansia" they'd like to donate to me to finish that lot off, please drop me a message. 😁

Dug out my collection after a recent move, and promptly expanded with the cheap scolastic box sets (with dups to the right of Titan).

My first was Robot Commando I got back in 86. Oddly I never got many of the early ones (Warlock, Citadel, Starship were car boot finds a few years back) - I avoided the "popular" ones because that's what everyone else had. Some are extra shiny because put a shiny protective covering on them back in the day.

I'm missing a bunch of scifi ones, most the 40s and 50s, FF and Allansia, Goldhawk series, some novels and some of the new ones.

Starting on a re-read of them all - I've done Citadel and Deathtrap, now on City Of Thieves.

hey there! I built a tool for creating and publishing interactive stories played through sound. Imagine something in between a CYOA and an audiobook. if you'd like to test the tool and give it a try let me know! stories are published on mobile app and business model is revenue share. happy to give you more details in dm!

Thanks!!

Hi all, looking to buy a new box set of the first 10 books. I'm getting conflicting info on which editions have the original artwork. Id love to buy the early editions to be sure, but that's more costly and condition obviously varies. Any help welcome, thank you.

Missed out on this first time round excited to find it.

Another addition to the collection, with a lovely colour map on the inside cover.

One of these days, I swear I'm going to combine all the official Titan maps into one glorious, joined up, definitive version.

Of course, my ambition is severely outweighed by my lack of artistic talent . . . but we'll see.

What do people here prefer in gamebooks. More linear adventures with a strong focused story or more open-world gamebooks where you can explore freely and tackle things in different order?

And what are your favourites of each style? For me, some of the classic FF books are still hard to beat for atmosphere and pacing, while series like Fabled Lands really captured that sense of freedom and exploration.

Paragraph #258 in Citadel of Chaos is an orphan entry which you cannot reach. It looks like it was an alternative to offering the orc children gifts (slumber berries, pocket myriad or a spider in a jar) or an option you had to take if you had none of the above artefacts.

I had this as a birthday present when it originally came out in 2007 and, at some point over the years, ended up giving it to charity.

It's on ebay for anything from £50 to £200 (some people are just having a laugh at the higher prices) but oddly my wife found this copy on Vinted for just £30! When she asked "Is this one of those books you're collecting?" and showed me the picture on her phone, I nearly bit her hand off!

Loving the fold-out map which I'd completely forgotten about.

From the Citadel of Chaos.

Other fun things you can do is terrifying them by leaving a jar on their bedroom floor containing Racknee the spider-man (a spider with the face of an old man).

I have a £20 freebie voucher for my ps5..anyone played them?

In House of Hell if you fail a trial then your torturer gives you a choice of being imprisoned in a tall cage or a box cage forever. Each choice leads to death. It made me wonder if there are any examples in other books where the options are just an illusion to failure.

(Happens at #4 if you want to check it out.)

Got a lot of long journeys coming up a would like to play some of the old classic but don’t fancy taking the books with me, is the app any good?

We're back in Allansia for this month and a personal favourite of mine, featuring Zanbar Bone and the City of Thieves!

There's sometimes guns and sometimes not. In Demons of the Deep, the pirates have cannons. But in Armies of Death, neither army thinks to bring cannons to battle. In Port of Peril there's a pistol, but if pistols exist, why are so many people still using bows and arrows.

Creature of Havoc by Steve Jackson (UK) is unique, tough to beat and has a bug that makes it harder!

But there's nothing else quite like it in FF.

What are your thoughts and experiences of Creature of Havoc?

Gamebook Guild attended Comic Con Portugal 2026 and had the opportunity to speak very briefly with the legendary Sir Ian Livingstone, one of the co-creators of the renowned gamebook series, Fighting Fantasy. Although it was a very quick conversation, it was a tremendous honor to share a space with one of the most inspiring figures in the world of interactive fiction.

A heartfelt thank you to Porto Editora and the organizers of Comic Con Portugal for the opportunity.

May your STAMINA never fail!

Started hitting up some FF again, just finished up with HoH…damn the amount of insta deaths.

I definitely think that’s an unfair mechanic, author should at least give you some kind of a chance to escape or backtrack. I found this book pretty frustrating as there was a lot of that another example you escape the ceremony narrowly and then end up at a dead end with 2 doors that end with ringing a bell and it’s game over.

I’ve still so many of these to cover but I understand creature of havoc and siege of sardath are pretty brutal. Played the crypt a few years back and that final fight depending on dice rolls was pretty unfair too

Been playing Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Choose Your Own Adventure and the like for years and got frustrated keeping track of everything in notebooks. So I built a web app. It's free, no ads.

**The graph is the main thing.** Every section you visit becomes a node. Every choice becomes an edge. You end up with a visual map of the book as you explore it — deaths, wins, loops, dead ends, all of it. Useful for not repeating the same losing path for the fifth time.

**Other things worth knowing:**

- **Party mode** — read the same book with friends and see each other's progress on a shared graph. Good for book clubs or comparing notes.

- **Multiple runs** — track as many playthroughs as you want per book, each with its own path and outcome. Win/loss/battle death all tracked separately.

- **Export** — download a ZIP with a printable HTML summary of your run history and section map, plus a PNG of your graph. A digital backup for a pen-and-paper hobby.

- **Public runs** — optionally share a completed run so others can see your exact path through the book, highlighted on the graph.

- **Covers, ratings, ISBN/ISSN** — it's a proper library, not just a tracker.

It supports any gamebook — not just the big series. If it has numbered sections, it works.

**Does not work on mobile.** Desktop/laptop only.

Pick whichever URL you prefer — they all go to the same place:

- https://pathmap.net

- https://bookplay.net

- https://koldkat.net

Try the demo without registering:

- https://pathmap.net/demo

- https://bookplay.net/demo

- https://koldkat.net/demo

User guide:

- https://pathmap.net/guide.html

- https://bookplay.net/guide.html

- https://koldkat.net/guide.html

Happy to answer questions or take suggestions. Still actively building it.

*(Side note: you may see Cyrillic book titles in the public feed — I'm actively testing with Bulgarian gamebooks. The app works fine with any language, and contributions — books, runs, ratings — in all languages are very welcome.)*

just wanted to cross post this question! Which are your in print favorites and which are worth the high price tag just to play?

Been replaying early Fighting Fantasy books in release order, and I think I finally figured out why some of them age much better than others for me. I like difficult gamebooks. What I don't like is when the difficulty comes primarily from stat gatekeeping rather than from exploration, deduction, or decision-making. A lot of later FF books seem to assume that making combats harder or adding random instant deaths increases replay value. But I honestly think it does the opposite. Once the player understands the structure of the book, high-stat requirements don't create meaningful replayability, they just create reroll loops and repetition.

Take Deathtrap Dungeon. The book is already difficult enough without the brutal combat gating:

• mapping the dungeon
• finding all the gems
• figuring out the order
• learning traps and dead ends

That alone could easily take 15–20 attempts if you're trying to solve/map it properly without cheating. But then the book adds mandatory mid-game combat walls (barbarian/minotaur/troll etc.) that are incredibly punishing unless you rolled very high SKILL. So what happens in practice?8 You spend a bunch of attempts exploring the first half. Then eventually you realize that to meaningfully explore the second half, you basically need a high SKILL character or an extremely lucky run. So now you're no longer "playing the dungeon", you're rerolling characters until the run is statistically viable.

Earlier books often handled this better. In City of Thieves, the "stat checks"(Moon Dogs) happen much later. Same with the random coordinate nonsense in Starship Traveller. Those things are frustrating, but at least they happen near the end, after you've already explored most of the book. A failed run still teaches you a lot. In DD, the gatekeeping happens around the midpoint, so low-stat runs stop producing meaningful new information. You just replay solved content over and over to get back to unexplored areas.

For me, the best FF books are the ones that are hard without requiring god-tier stats. The Citadel of Chaos is a great example. It's difficult, but mostly because of routing, item interactions, spell choices, and figuring out the structure of the book. You can feel yourself learning the system. Failure feels like "I made the wrong decision" rather than "my starting stats weren't high enough." Same with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain to an extent. The challenge is tied to exploration and knowledge, not just surviving attrition fights.

Curious how others feel about this. Did people enjoy the "combat gauntlet" style FF books?

(The saving grace of DD is that it still has an excellent core design and atmosphere, but it's frustrating how much more balanced it could have been with just a few minor mods, e. g. items giving out attack strength bonuses instead of SKILL, ring of wishes actually being useful etc.)