The Task Ahead

I picked up my daughter, showed her this array, and said, 'One day, all this will be yours.'

Labours of Joy / Livres des Jeux

I'll be using eBay to sell off some of my multiple copies - I don't think I need six versions of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or The Forest of Doom, even if they do have different covers.

On the subject of covers, the iconic covers for me are the jagged green stripe 'Adventure Gamebook' covers. I don't think that the coloured star was enough to create an identity, and I never took to the dragon logo. I think this was because I moved abroad - to a non-English speaking country - during the mid-eighties for a good few years, left with only the gamebooks I had carried with me. And by the time I came back... things had changed!

The jagged stripe was used, as you can see, on the Sorcery! series (naturally enough), as well as the Cretan Chronicles and Maelstrom both of which I remember borrowing from the library in the 1980s. What I didn't know until this week was that the jagged stripe was also used on a series of gamebooks for girls - Starlight Adventures!

Do you think that the statue comes to life and that you have to fight it to find a numbered key?