Steve Jackson, Fighting Fantasy: Starship Traveller
1983 / Adventure gamebook / 1-3 players / UK
***
I wasn't expecting this sci-fi stretching of the fantasy gamebook format to be all that good when rounding out my genre trilogy, but I was hoping it would be a good retrofuturistic wheeze at least. Finding out that it was straight-up Star Trek fan fiction with the proper nouns changed was a bit disappointing, but it's an easy shorthand (and light years better than the official gamebooks they put out). You can even recruit subordinate siblings to handle the tedious dice rolls of your away team if they want to feel useful and you need someone to blame.
These mini episodes aren't especially compelling, but the arena's large enough to welcome return treks to seek out new varieties of premature death every time like a maddening arcade game.
