“It’s not necessary for you to turn yourself into a bird.”

Some gamebooks banked on gimmicks to set them apart from the household Choose Your Own Adventure brand. Interplanetary Spy relied on minigames and a sleek sci-fi motif. Fighting Fantasy presented a “solo RPG” take on the format, with tabletop gaming mechanics and dice rolling. Combat Heroes and 1-On-1 designed their books to be two-player experiences. Super Eye Adventure used mostly lame “magic eye” images.

None were quite as a-mazing as Your Amazing Adventures. Pun intended.

Your Amazing Adventures was a series of six gamebooks set in a fantasy world (as beautifully illustrated by veteran comic artist Paul Abrams) where we control a nameless nerd with a slingshot accompanied by a snarky pirate and a cute blonde with a whip, who is clearly the fan favorite around the office as she features prominently on several covers of this series.

And yes, the series name is a play on words. You don’t make the decisions yourself, like you do in a typical (and arguably better) gamebook. Rather, this is a series of linear fantasy books where you are occasionally confronted with a maze, and if you reach the correct exit, you continue the story.

Second place is death.

The story continues the ongoing adventures of You (we don’t actually have a name) as he/we goes/go around this stock fantasy world getting roped into other people’s problems. In this case we start things off like any good Dungeons & Dragons campaign, getting soused in a port city tavern with Thea, the minx with the whip; Teppin, a surly ex-pirate with a big ol’ knife; and Warkus, a wizard we apparently befriended in the previous book.

As we recount our previous outings and argue over who had the biggest body count, into Filthy Pierre’s Bilge Barge struts a young prince, who tells us that Scrindirc (the titular Dragonmaster, which is how I will refer to him from now on because that name is as painful to write as it is to pronounce) has burnt up the prince’s navy, kingdom, and basically everything else but the outhouse, and hires us as the new admiral of his navy, which now consists of a single beaten-up ship and the former admiral who is wallowing in useless depression.

Along the way we also befriend a dragon disguised as a human sorceress, who isn’t fooling anyone because her human name is Dragona, for God’s sake. But we let it slide, because she’s an otherworld babe, and if there’s one thing the Edgar Rice Burroughs fan in me can’t pass up, it’s an otherworld babe.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The maze gimmick is little more than that: a gimmick. It fails to engage you in the story to the same degree as simply choosing which path to take, although it’s not really the maze gimmick’s fault on its own. I think the linearity is more to blame than anything.

See, each maze has two or three exits that take you to specific pages. But only one of them continues the story, as I said before, and it’s always the one that takes you to the very next page. Any exit that doesn’t lead to the next page will instead lead you to a very messy death. It’s a shame that author Richard Brightfield didn’t milk the maze aspect as far as he could, by making the narrative itself a labyrinth of alternate paths. The Dragonmaster really is just a YA fantasy novel at the end of the day. You can read the chapters in order, simply turning the page when you come to a maze, and finish the story without any trouble.

It’s also kind of funny how the art style for the illustrations is drastically different than that of the mazes. The chapter art looks like they belong in Marvel Comics. The mazes look like they belong on the family fridge. In the opening pages we see that the art credits go to Paul and Karen Abrams, and I’m left wondering if Paul didn’t commission his eight-year-old daughter as an assistant.

The psychedelic Dragon Soup Maze is pretty cool, though.

Outside of the gimmick, the story is actually pretty fun and has a few memorable moments. Brightfield lets the early scenes develop in a way that makes me feel like I’ve just joined a Pathfinder session, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the inspiration for these stories came from the author’s tabletop nights. As a fleet of dragon riders swoop in and set fire to a city, ol’ Daddy Warkus casts a spell on the smoke rising from the burning houses and twists it into a smoke giant that promptly begins swatting dragons out of the sky like bugs. And small wonder why our medieval heroes can’t identify or neutralize the Dragonmaster’s mysterious magic: he’s using space-age tech in Middle Earth, and his “magical” metal dragon is basically the Millennium Falcon.

And speaking of Warkus, the old wizard is undoubtedly the MVP of this game night. I don’t know why he isn’t the main character. Whenever we encounter a threat, our response is something like this:

• I/You/We shoot it with slingshot, to little effect.
• Thea cracks her whip, to slightly more effect.
• Teppin waves his knife and goes “Yarr!”
• Warkus bends time, space, and nature to his will like a god on earth, and murders absolutely everything in our path.

We really should just put him out front every time. In fact, send him to deal with all this dragon nonsense. The rest of us are going back to the pub.

I found Your Amazing Adventures to be in a similar wheelhouse to the Dragontales series, though I wouldn’t say it’s quite as good. There’s some great action set pieces and plenty of fantasy babes, and that’s all I can ask for at the end of the day. These books also seem to be on the rare side, so it won’t hurt to add them to your gamebook library (assuming you have one, you weirdo). This particular volume is the easiest to come by at the moment, so if I’ve sold you on it, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting a copy.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.