Category: Gamebooks

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

June 26, 2026

I was stoked to buy the above three Japanese Fighting Fantasy (FF) books on the recent trip. Each is in immaculate condition for books almost forty years old, and included unused adventure sheets (shown below each in the photo). These weren’t cheap, but I now own 75% of the original Japanese editions and if I see one I don’t own, I’m buying it 🙂

This was a surprise! Tantalon’s Cube describes itself as the first Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF) adventure, and is a lengthy quest where adventures must assembled the ‘Cube Of Balance’ created by the legendary King Tantalon to save the Kingdom of Galantaria from invasion. This – a Japanese only book – seems to be full of references to the larger FF world, not the least being Tantalon himself. I’m sure you’ll agree the cover art is wonderful.

The book itself is a traditional RPG module in the bunko (A6) size as was common in Japan when it was printed. It’s full of original art and many half-page small maps like those above. I’ve never seen or even heard of this book before, so I was surprised to find it for a very low cost (under $10)!

I don’t often buy Japanese AFF rulebooks, but I like monster manuals and this recently printed third version caught my eye.

Much like the previous ‘Out Of The Pit’ monster manuals this is loaded with stat blocks for monsters taken from FF books, including the newer titles published during the Wizard and Scholastic era. Lots of lovely art and detailed descriptions for beasts that had perhaps a single line in the original books 🙂

This is the very recent Japanese translation of the FF history book first published in 2014. From what I read this was a kickstarted product that is currently still shipping to backers, so I was surprised to find it in a used store. This was expensive, at about $100.

I was even more surprised when I opened it and found it was actually new! This is a lovely book – printed on high quality paper, hardbound and with a metallic ink and red velvet cover. It’s also written in an interactive format which surprised me, since I’ve got the original 2014 version (and the 2016 update), neither of which were written as a gamebook:

I was so impressed by this updated version I’ve now purchased the English edition, which while hardly as impressive in terms of production quality, means I’ll be able to read it!

But the best part of this premium set is the inclusion of a separate, smaller volume that is a history of FF in Japan. As a collector of the Japanese editions, I hope this is full of answers to many questions I have:

The above example page contains a discussion of Japanese bootleg FF books (!) and the entry itself is impossible to reach if you read the book interactively, which is a joke reference to paragraphs in some FF books which the player can never read without ‘cheating’ 🙂

I’m very much looking forward to reading this Japanese history!

Lastly I purchased nine Queen’s Blade gamebooks. I already owned about twenty, and with this purchase I think I have more than half of them. These remain very inexpensive at the used stores in Japan – none of the above cost me more than $7 – and I’ll continue to buy them as I see them on future trips.

Happy Birthday To Me

March 3, 2026

For a time now I’d been wanting to reduce my collection of gamebooks. This was partially for space, and partially so I could concentrate on the series that mean the most to me. I found potential buyers online but the (very fair) offers received for the books I had decided to sell hardly covered the cost of shipping them. I had no regrets when I decided to toss about 200 books into a recycling bin a few weekends ago.

The silver lining of this process was that in the process of searching for potential buyers I found a store that had some items for sale I was very interested in. I hastily made a purchase, and a box arrived in time for my birthday (today). These were inside:

The core of my collection is the Fighting Fantasy series, which I have loved since childhood. I’ve got hundreds of volumes, which means many copies of each since there are only about 70 unique books. It’s been many years since I’ve found an imprint I didn’t have, so I was surprised to see the above for sale. Of course I already own each book – in fact I already had 8 different copies alone of City Of Thieves – but I didn’t own the ‘Green stripe’ edition. Now I do 🙂

As happy as I was with these, I also bought this:

I was absolutely amazed to see they had this. It’s issue #2 of the Fighting Fantasy magazine from 1985. This was a ‘holy grail’ item to me, and given the scarcity of these I had essentially given up ever owning one.

It’s a fairly slim publication, sparse on editorial content. It reprints (half of) Warlock Of Firetop Mountain with beautiful large reproductions of the art, and also contained an original new solo adventure called Caverns Of The Snow Witch:

It’s short at only 190 entries, but would eventually be expanded and become the 9th FF book. I recall when I learned this as a child being amazed a magazine existed with gamebook adventures in it!

Indeed Warlock magazine was almost unobtainable in Australia. I somehow knew of it and looked for it in newsagents but only ever owned one copy, specifically #11 (which Adam inherited from me and graciously returned to me decades later). Much later I learned the magazine was poorly distributed even in the UK, so it’s a miracle any ever made their way to Australia at all.

So you can imagine how fast I clicked that ‘submit order’ button when the store I bought the above at didn’t just have one Warlock, but had eight:

These are all from 40+ years ago, and represent about two-thirds of the entire run of the magazine (which ended at issue #13). I was so happy to open the box when they arrived, and learn they were all in great condition. Whoever owned these took care of them!

These magazines are a delightful window into the early years of gamebooks. Full of news, reviews, artwork and advertisements, they also contain many original adventures – almost none of which were ever republished.

These magazines were never distributed to the USA so I remain amazed I found them for sale at an American hobby store. I wonder if they came from the same collection, and why the owner sold them?

And if you’re wondering, yes they were expensive 🙂

The above is a photo of my current Japanese Warlock magazine collection. I’ve got almost all of them, and you can see the magazine survived much longer in Japan than the 13-issues it ran for in the UK. Here’s a photo of the first dozen issues in two different languages:

Just holding and flipping through these brings a big smile to my face. Happy Birthday to me 🙂

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

January 14, 2026

I bought the above four on this recent trip, which now takes my Japanese Fighting Fantasy collection to over 75% complete. These were purchased at Mandarake in Osaka, which is where I had the conversation with the Japanese collector, and I couldn’t help but note that each of the above cost more than the total cost of the four books he was deliberating on buying. I sympathized with him that people like myself were the cause of the prices of these books continuing to go up every year.

The Freeway Fighter is notable. The used shops in Japan bag all the books with notes about their condition. Usually these are simply things like ‘missing obi’ or ‘damage on cover’ or ‘writing inside’ but for this book it simply translated to ‘this is new’. I can believe this is literal, because the book is in absolutely pristine condition, especially for something 38 years old!

Incidentally all four of these contained their original unused adventure sheets. The same store had a second copy of Rings Of Kether without the adventure sheet that was ¥2000 cheaper, so I suppose that’s the ‘value’ of the sheet!

I also picked up the above 9 issues of Japanese Warlock magazine. I could have even purchased more (at another store), but I didn’t expect to find so many and hadn’t kept track of the ones I had already bought. I paid a pretty penny for these (about $25 each on average), and even the cheapest issue cost more than any I had bought on previous trips. I’m very happy that I bought large lots of this magazine before the prices started becoming unreasonable!

These are all in immaculate condition. When I first learned Japan had published their own version of Warlock I never imagined I’d ever see a copy: now I own 92% of the 63-issue run! I think completing the entire series is possible, since most of the ones I am missing are random issues from the middle years, which remain some of the less-expensive issues.

I don’t know much about this, except that it’s a Japanese version of a very limited and difficult-to-obtain recent (Australian!) board game based on Fighting Fantasy. This was a bit big and a bit heavy but also not very expensive (about $40) so of course I had to get it. I haven’t even opened it so that’s all I can say for now 🙂

Temple of Flame is the second in the Golden Dragon series of gamebooks from 1987. I’ve actually got a few imprints of this book, but this one was very inexpensive (only $2) so I couldn’t pass on it. To my surprise it came with a tiny insert about gamebooks!

It folds out into 16 pages of dense micro-font text with game reviews and previews and discussion of how to enjoy gamebooks. I would have loved something like this included with the books I bought as a child, and I’m happy it survived all these years and is now in my collection.

I bought the above four Queen’s Blade books this trip. Almost every trip I usually buy one of these, and I now have about half the entire series. This trip they seemed more common, and unlike many other gamebooks the prices seem to have gone down – I didn’t pay more than $6 for any of these four.

Queen’s Blade is a weird thing, derived from a western gamebook series (Lost Worlds) and yet having taken on its own identity in Japan. The books are attractive and if the prices continue to drop I may start buying more in the future.

I saw more gamebooks than on any previous trip. Not just old ones, but brand new publications as well (like the Mashle one above). I saw evidence of collections being sold – Surugaya in Osaka had maybe twenty different Lupin gamebooks – as well as a higher awareness on behalf of sellers of the rarity and collectibility of what they had, such as Dragon Quest and Gundam books that I’d previously seen – even bought! – sitting on shelves for under ¥500 now in showcases for many times that price. Many of these Japan-only books often catch my eye, but I usually move on since I have no history with the series. This trip was the exception.

The above were in a showcase in Surugaya in Akihabara. I had bought a Wizardry item from the same case (it’ll be in the next post) and something about these books intrigued me. There’s precious little information online but I determined this was the complete three-book ‘Sexy Game Book‘ series from 1986 and that they are rare and sought after. While they were expensive I’d never seen them before and doubted I’d ever see them again, so I bought all three!

Astonishingly, this is a combination of gamebook and gravure pinup. Almost every entry has a photo – many in colour – and the stories feature monsters in real-world settings and seem to be evocative of something like Kamen Rider or other 1980s Japanese science fiction. The books are written in first person and despite the imagery seem to have a serious tone.

They’re also, to use the Japanese word, ‘ecchi’, which means they contain (tame) nudity! These are extraordinary books, obviously for adults, and are evidence of how big the hobby was in Japan in those days. I doubt I’ll ever own anything else as unusual as these, and I’m happy to have them in the collection!

Robot Claw