House of Danger

I hadn't realized there were board games based on Choose Your Adventure books, but here we are. It's not a competitive game, as there's only one character. So whether you play by yourself or with others, you control the same character.

The game is split into Chapters, each of which has a goal you have to achieve before you can move to the next Chapter. The story is written out on numbered cards, with the old, "If you want to do {x}, go to Card 27. If you want to do {y}, go to Card 14." When you reach the Chapter's end, you are given the option to go back and investigate places you didn't in the Chapter. The risk being you might be killed. We tried backtracking once in Chapter 1, and were torn apart by Dobermans controlled by a violin-playing chimp.

We didn't backtrack any more after that.

The game gives you two cards that have items on them that can help you. It's always the same two items, but there are many others you can collect as you move through the game. Some of those are one-offs, others can be used as much as you want. The board has two scales on it, Danger Level and Psychic Level. When faced with a Challenge, you have to roll a die and get equal to or higher than the Danger Level to succeed. Psychic Level will enable you to find extra Clues that could come in handy. If you fail a Challenge, the game will tell you to raise the Danger Level a certain number of spaces, and try again. It isn't a 1:1 that the Danger Level increases by, more like 3 spaces to increase by 1. But that could certainly complicate things in a hurry.

I think, if there's more than one person involved, you're supposed to take turns on who rolls the die and who decides which options to take. I was playing with a friend, it was their game, and they handled all the die rolling, and we largely discussed which options to take. It is possible to get a bad ending, as you might expect. In our case, we needed to do more exploring and risk-taking, because we ended up not having some key items.

But it's a fast, easy to learn choice if you want to play something cooperative, or just kill some time solo.