The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested in interactive storytelling, you should check it out!

A Golden Opportunity is the third competition entry I’m covering. For an overview of what I’m especially looking for in gamebooks, please refer to my coverage of the first entry, The House on Happy Hill.

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After having highlighted the excellent polishing, but unfocused plot of the wizardry tapestry The House on Happy Hill, as well as the diametrically opposite issues of the near-future action thriller Scopes, I was delighted to find that A Golden Opportunity offered both: It’s a tale of thievery that clearly establishes your role (a thief), the relevant environment (a city at medieval or maybe beginning renaissance tech level with a lot of shady inhabitants) and the focus of your quest (a gold bar of immense value, stored in a safe of a rich guy’s mansion). And it’s obvious that the author has put a lot of work into formatting, linking, in short: polishing the entire work. So far, so good. Is it perfect? Ah, not so fast. Let’s get to the plot at first.

Notably, the exposition sections of Opportunity take even more space than those of Scopes, but where Scopes uses its space to establish a background that I found somewhat forced, and that – more importantly – has little relevance for the narrative of the 100 sections itself, Opportunity knows exactly which elements to enrich with detail and which to leave in the mists. The name of the world? We don’t even get the name of the city! The political situation, the presence of magic? Unexplained, because for our burglary ballad, none of this really matters. Instead, we learn about our hero’s (well, maybe antihero’s) personal past, more about the very personal connection to the guy who hires us for the operation, and a lot about the operation itself. I won’t tell more about the story, because of course there are some tricks and turns. Overall, while it didn’t leave me with wide eyes and an open mouth, it delivered exactly what it promised. What’s more, it gave me the distinct impression that another run could go in an entirely different way, which is always satisfying; apart from a few key passages, further playthroughs confirmed this.

Okay, so plot, writing, structure are fine. What else? Well, not even a master thief can avoid every single trap, and Opportunity has unfortunately fallen into some bad ones.

The book is generally very polished, on par with Happy Hill; there are a bunch of missing commas, but those are of minor importance. What I do not quite understand is the author’s decision to put all dialogue in italics. Yes, every single sentence. I haven’t seen this anywhere else in literature, and I think it’s somewhat over the top. It also runs into the issue that italics are usually used to convey passages of special importance, or of something not in line with the general flow of the narrative; emphasis, inner monologues, flashbacks and so on. The breach of this convention irritated me for quite a while, and I suspect I won’t be the only one with this experience.

Another issue leaves me uncertain about whether there’s a conscious decision behind it, namely the lack of initial scores for your statistics. We have ratings for attack, defence, strength, agility and charisma, and there’s even a heading for “Starting Stats.” However, all that’s listed there is the starting equipment. This is really problematic, because so much of the game flow depends on rolling checks for these statistics; by my count, a whopping 17 sections, 1/6 of the entire adventure, demand a roll with 2d6, and most of these are stat checks. Of course, it might be that the starting bonuses for all stats are meant to be zero (except for damage which is boosted by your starting weapon), but I really, really would have liked a positive confirmation for that. Because the game is not exactly friendly to guesswork.

See, the thing is that the author wanted to create an “admin light” gamebook, as is noted in the introduction, without “constant rubbing out of frequently changing numbers.” That’s not a bad idea in general, but it means that we have no value for “hit points” or something similar. And this means, in turn, that especially the later fights come down to a literal “die” roll: You win, or you die. There is no middle ground.

To put it differently: Nearly all the later enemies will one-shot you, and you will one-shot them. (Emphasis intentional.) That’s the result of not having a hit point value. To make up for this, the author set most of the check target values pretty low, but this begs the question why we are having them in the first place. And while removing the hit point score does relieve the player from some administrative burden, we still have an equipment list, various keywords, checkboxes, a limited coin purse, and five statistics which may not change frequently, but are not set in stone either. At least to me, putting a hit point score on top of that would not have made much of an administrative difference, and it would have allowed subtler outcomes of the various fights. (For a really admin light gamebook, see Scopes.)

The way it is, with the missing clarity about the initial stats and the “insta-kill” nature of many checks, I eventually gave up on even guessing probabilities and basically removed the randomness from consideration. This allowed me to have fun with the story, the many options for interacting with the populace and the different paths in general. Make no mistake: Opportunities is still a fine book, and despite these issues a candidate for my top 3, simply because the foundation works so well. It’s just, in my eyes, a missed opportunity for an absolute top-notch entry.

Conclusion

• Writing: Very good, atmospheric, generally easy to read, with memorable characters.
• Plot: Good – a standard caper storyline with some nice side ideas and no grave flaws.
• System: Yeah… with the win-or-die checks and the lack of clarity about the starting stats, I sadly find this pretty frustrating.
• Structure: Great. A lot of freedom in the initial part, which also leads to different encounters in the later parts depending on your decisions; I also liked the multiple approaches to solve a number of problems.
• Execution: Good, but not flawless.
• Overall: Candidate for my top 3, but seeing how there is still potential for improvement, could easily be pushed out by more well-rounded entries. And we have 17 of them!