Fighting Fantasy Quest: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain Preview

If you’re somewhere between 40 and 60 years old, living in the UK, and even remotely into fantasy, there’s a good chance you came across a Fighting Fantasy book when you were growing up. They’re adventure books in a similar vein to the Choose Your Own Adventure series, but with more going on. Dice, stats, and something a little closer to an RPG experience. The series, created by Steve Jackson and Sir Ian Livingstone, has seen a resurgence lately. Last year saw Fighting Fantasy Adventures, and this year it’s the turn of the board game version of the first book in the series (and a personal favourite of mine), The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

Warlock has had lots of different incarnations over the years. I played the ZX Spectrum game of the same name for hours and hours when I was young (note: it had almost nothing to do with the book), and the recent video game from developers Tin Man was great. Now, though, we have an analogue game. A tabletop board game, and a very good one at that.

The crawl

As you might expect, Fighting Fantasy Quest: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a dungeon crawler. There are four characters to choose from, each with a different role and set of skills, and together (or by yourself, solo gamers) you venture into the heart of the mountain to search for the titular warlock’s treasure.

Naturally, there are all kinds of creatures and monsters who’d rather you didn’t make off with the gold. They’ll do their level best to bonk you on the head with all manner of weapons and spells, meaning you’ll have a fight on your hands, and no mistake.

Gameplay is pretty easy, which is great to see. Some of the people picking this game up will be doing it driven by nostalgia for their youth, and may not have played a modern board game, so keeping the barrier to entry low is a massive win. On your turn, you move orthogonally from square to square, flipping encounter tokens and room tiles as you go.

Encounters are often ‘tests’, where you roll a number of dice based on your character’s skills and items, and try to roll a number of successes dictated by the scenario’s difficulty level. Flipping room tiles is the most interesting part, and the thing which most reminds me of the book. Many times, it’ll ask you to draw a card from the scenario’s deck, which furnishes you with a bit of story and gives you a choice to make. Do you try to sneak past those goblins, or do you go in bold as brass and see how they react?

Choosing what happens in your story is at the core of Fighting Fantasy, so seeing it preserved in the game is wonderful.

To arms!

What’s a dungeon crawler without combat? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s boring. So it’s a good thing that The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is chock-full of fighting. Combat is actually pretty tough, too. Each monster you encounter has its own out-of-the-box stats, but to keep things spicy, the game demands that you draw random combat tokens to bolster each one.

I was pleasantly surprised by how tricky the combat can be. If you played any of the original Fighting Fantasy books, you’ll remember how difficult they could be. It’s not a walk in the park, and you will suffer losses. Some people won’t like that, but to me that makes the game feel honest, and helps it retain some of the heart and soul of the book that inspired it.

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I have a strange relationship with Dungeon Crawlers. I often love the idea of playing them more than I do actually playing them. Over the course of writing this review, I’ve spent some time looking inward and trying to figure out why, and I think it’s the combat in them. I really didn’t get on with Gloomhaven, and other games take too light a touch, like the otherwise very enjoyable Bag of Dungeon, which I reviewed some years back. Warlock hits the sweet spot for me. The enemies hard hard without being impossible. They’re not so easy that fights are just ceremonial wastes of time, It’s a nice balance which keeps the players moving forward, but with the distinct feeling that they’ve got a fight on their hands.

Final thoughts

I went into Warlock with very little expectation. I loved the book, and I’ve been stung by enough bad franchise cash-grabs over the years to be wary. I was really pleasantly surprised though. Fighting Fantasy Quest: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain does a commendable job of doing justice to the source material. I only had three scenarios to play in the prototype I was sent, but even that was enough to leave me with a pleasant taste in my mouth.

One of the biggest challenges was always going to be making the game feel like a Fighting Fantasy book, but it does it really well. I can’t speak about its longevity or replayability, because like I said, I only had three missions to play through, but the choose-your-own-adventureness is there in the choices you make before you flip the tiles. I remember playing the books and always having one finger in the page I came from, just in case I didn’t like the consequences of my actions. Nobody can stop you changing your mind once you read the card in your scenarios, and I love the game for that.

Warlock fills that gap in the dungeon crawler genre I think gets overlooked too often. Heavy, sprawling, life-occupying games are everywhere. Games you get delivered on a pallet by a forklift truck. Light and breezy games get their day too. But this sort of medium-weight, non-commital dungeon blast is all too rare. In the same way Modiphius nailed Mass Effect last year (read that review here), Paul and Jan have made a game here which feels Fighting Fantasy, and doesn’t ask you to rewrite your social calendar for the next year just to see it through.

At the time of writing the crowdfunding campaign for Fighting Fantasy Quest: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is ongoing. You can view the campaign page here.

Pros & Cons