Title: The Ice Dragon
Author: Gary Gygax and Flint Dille
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 188
Rating: 9/10
This book is unusual in that it’s not a straightforward novel, but rather a choose your own adventure from the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, with a unique playing method to boot. You can play along with it using a four-sided die, or you can simply flick through the pages, each of which is given a number of 1-4, to determine the outcome of the roll.
This allows for intuitive combat with the monsters, which a traditional choose your own adventure novel doesn’t deliver – you can die due to bad luck, which adds an extra element of chance to the book, and you’re supposed to strike off the hit-points of your character and the monster you’re fighting with a pencil, although it’s easy enough to do it off the top of your head.
All in all, this book isn’t for everyone, but it’s a definite must-read for fantasy fans and former players of Dungeons and Dragons, like myself. I’ve never seen anything else like it.