itch.io

'Confused' seems to be the dominant response. I think only one person - apart from me - has not referred either to being confused or just not knowing what they were looking at. This one other person is a philosopher and (like me) a designer of historical board games, so possibly in possession of a similarly wired (or unwired) mind.

Thanks. Yes, I should send Simon a message.

I'm glad gamebook authors are venturing into this territory, which is now very adjacent to the tabletop world in the form of write-and-roll games. However, I really think Bunker 13 would benefit hugely from being a tabletop game i.e. with some additional components. It would be much easier with 30 little cubes being moved from box to box, rather than having write and cross out umpteen times. However, my main issue with the game is the lack of player agency. You get to choose which group to benefit from medicine (if you have any), how to ration food supplies, and you have a binary choice on some of the events. And that, as far as I can tell, is it. The rest of the game is chance. In particular, you have only a 1 in 9 chance in any given week (starting from week 5) of reaching the win condition - the outcome of the game is highly dependent on when (or, indeed, whether) you roll a double 1, 1+6, or double 6.

Okay, I should point out that I'm not a fan of dungeon adventures. They really need to be very good or very different to retain my interest. You start with a great selling point - an isometric drawing. So, it's a shame that the illustration is rather small - why not enlarge it so that it covers the width of the page? Then you could even fill in the gaps in the corners with other motifs or possibly even with text. Also, isn't putting the items in the illustration rather too helpful? Especially as you can see exactly where you need to go - so you lose one of the major attractions of a dungeon setting.

I found the battle rules very confusingly written (not to mention rather lengthy). If the order is determined randomly, then why does the opponent always roll the dice to defend? It seems to be written as if there are two players in the game, rather than the player character and an enemy. And exactly how many dice are rolled to attack or defend? It doesn't state. I suspect you mean a single die - as the table refers to '1 die' for Battle form - but I can't be sure.  

I really like that the premise of this adventure is a trade agreement rather than a dungeon or other overused gamebook trope. The lengthy introduction really sets the scene. And the plot is very interesting for such a short narrative.

My only negative criticism is that there are some problems with the language. There is too much use of pronouns. For example, the use of 'they' right at the end of the introduction confused me at first - I had to reread a previous paragraph to find out who the pronoun referred to. And when you start a paragraph - for example 5 - I really think you should name 'Dale and his bodyguards' rather than using the anonymous pronoun. It's a little strange that 'And the monkey disappears from view...' is a player choice. It would make more sense written as something like 'Dale runs after the monkey'.  You slipped into past tense a couple of times - it was most disconcerting.

There are a couple of errors in the referencing - paragraph 2 should lead to 6, and 12 to the whatever is the first reference in the building - I assume 5, although there's no indication that you came in from outside. The two diagrams for the combats really should have squares rather than rectangles and some sort of icons - ideally coloured ones - would be a big improvement over the letters. The potential twist at the end is my favourite part.   

This is a clearly a professional entry - it shows that four people were involved in producing it. The concept behind the adventure is interesting and it is well executed. I think the map should be larger as it is the key to the game and ideally you should be able to circle the numbers for the door episodes as an aide memoire. The formatting is too tight with not enough space between the episode numbers and the preceding paragraphs, nor between the illustrations and the text. Overall, it looks as though you've tried to squeeze a little too much into 4 pages - it would be fine if you spread it over 5 pages.  As for the theme and narrative, I really liked the Tesseract itself but I just didn't buy the involvement of a Professor of Theoretical Physics - I studied physics myself at university, and found that such academics are not the adventurous type!