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Eh, there okay I guess. The game system itself is nice, and some of the stories are decent, but WAY too hard! I remember one in particular, if you didn't get every single item in the book, you couldn't win.

I only had 21 of them as they only produced that many in the US. Wasn't until years later that I found out they had actually created 59 of the things.

Usually the difficulty was based on who wrote the books.

If it was Ian Livingstone, he usually had tough battles which pretty much required you to have high stats when you first rolled up your character. Trying to "win" with a SKILL of less than 10 was usually not going to happen. He also had a tendency to make it necessary for you find some crucial items that were also required for you to win.

If it was Steve Jackson (English), he was a little more forgiving with the battles, in fact there was usually a path that avoided the tough ones (Usually requiring an item though) but he often a few puzzles in his books and if you couldn't figure them out, you wouldn't be able to continue.

If you got both of them contributing to a book, it had a combo of tough battles and puzzles.

There were some other writers, difficulty varied with them, but the quality of writing usually wasn't as good as Ian or Steve. The best "other writer" was probably the "other" Steve Jackson (American), since his FF books usually had multiple ways to win, with some paths just being better or harder than others.

The Lone Wolf series of course had a better sense of continuity since you were just using the same character, but there were also some insanely difficult battles in that series in parts.

i have three of steve jackson's books. they are very entertaining, though the need for paper and pen is very annoying...