In Cerca di Fortuna (In Search of Luck, Ripostes edition, 1987) by the ludologist and games author Andrea Angiolino – at that time about twenty-year-old – is a fantasy tale. The main character is the “play-reader”, that ventures in the flourishing city of Ianua (carefully described) and in the territories of Valverde to reach the place where the treasure of the adventurer Leonbrando is hidden. The surrounding looks like the Italian Middle-Ages and all the actions (perhaps too many cities!) are soaked of mistery, the mistery that sometimes lacks in the phases of the book. The text presents the classical character sheet, divided in strength, agility, toughness, vitality and combat bonus, with two additional sections to write down the equipment and the money, that increase or decrease during the narration. The sheet ends with a series of spaces where you have to write the letters that can be found in the several “adventure-cards” – some of which are accompanied by the evocative illustrations of Gianluca Meluzzi – and that represent the special events. The abilities of the character are not established a priori but deserve construction and preparation with the aid of one die: after all you are equipping and training a cadet! This preparation is helped by examples in the following pages, with all the opportune indications. As the title underlines, the luck follows the protagonist, which often uses the die for his choices… or uses those little dice drawn in the corners of every page! Besides the basic rules there are additional ones that concern the fighting, the escape from it and the tossing of arrows. Often in your fight you can clash with “tough” skeletons that want to defend the territory where their souls found the death; it is admirable the clash with the Wyvern, a mythological creature with a really venomous tail!!! You can even solve the game without killing it. And to escape the labyrinth, provide yourself – my cadets – with parchment paper and ink… Paint the map and you will have the possibility to exit from it! The lack of suspense in the book is explained just by its “computer adventure” style, but I give you an advice: try to find it, and play it!!! (PL)

Il Presidente del Consiglio sei tu (The Prime Minister is You, by G & L, Oscar Mondadori, 1987) was on sale in a summer of university exams, for me and Vincenzo. As we became curious thanks to some articles on the Italian “politics” weekly magazines, we both bought a copy of it. It was a political book-game where at the beginning you could choose your party (the majority party or the opposition party) and a set of characteristics (competence, health…). Then you had to jump one paragraph after the other, following your choices. These choices were often forced by your characteristics that in most cases prevented the reach of the final victory, represented, as the title says, by the investiture to Prime Minister. At the beginning, the reader often tried the easy victory, as a majority politician. If you were a Christian Democrat, even if you risked stabs by your party companions and infarcts by hyperwork, you had an easy way, according to what had happened since then in real Italian Republic. The game scheme was rather linear: the chosen characteristics were the “keys” to open some of the doors between the alternatives of the tale, without any fineness of mechanism. The style, on the contrary, was very careful, light and humorous, and the bad endings always wrung a smile. So you had the wish to try it again… this time maybe cheating! If you managed, with difficulty, to overcome the challenge as a Christian Democrat, you could try to go to the government as a communist. It was a hard venture, where the obstacles where often irrational (are you really competent? Then you sink in a cultural committee for the rest of your life…). The mechanism was the same, but less combinations of characteristics allowed to “open the doors” towards the victory. We succeeded, anyway, probably, with the aid of some… stratagem: in the long run, besides the challenge, the game had become rather worn-out. In a later evaluation, it is necessary to consider – as at that time it was called – the context. For me, that was surely the first entertaining example of a book-game, after the unlucky experiments with the texts published in Italy by E-Elle (1985-1986), that were less edited, even if they had a similar schema. But I had faced the E-Elle books in summer, as an alternative to rest or other amusements. While Il Presidente del Consiglio sei tu had supported us in the breaks during the preparation of a particularly boring exam. And which book would not be bringing out, in memory, in confrontation with the handbook of chemistry-physics? (DDG)