If you live in Britain and you aren't the sort who feels like looting shops and chucking bricks at the police in response to a school stabbing tragedy, and if you deplore the cheapening of British politics by the Trump-wannabes of Reform UK, you might want to register your support for a more international and inclusive worldview by coming to London on Saturday for the Rejoin EU march. (Strictly a peaceful and civilized affair, this, so angry old gammons may prefer to stay home and wrestle their XL bullies.)

If marching isn't your thing, there's an open letter you can sign. Or, if you're interested in the whole UK/EU question but don't have a strong view either way, or even if you still think Brexit could work out fine, you could just play Can You Brexit? and see how you get on. (Hint: if you just make decisions at random you'll still do better than the Tory governments of the last eight years.)

Still, we're all for evidence-based reasoning here. No ideology counts a jot against hard facts, so be sure to fully research the subject before you form an opinion, and be ready to update your opinion if the facts change.

Eight years ago almost to the day, a referendum in the United Kingdom voted 52/48 to leave the European Union. Regular readers cannot fail to have noticed that I was one of the 48% (nowadays more like 63%). I didn't imagine I could know in advance whether the eventual outcome would be good or bad, but I do know that extreme perturbations to complex systems (like modern societies, for example) can have highly unpredictable results. Unless the current state of such a system is catastrophically bad to the point of imminent failure, it never makes sense to make revolutionary changes rather than gradual ones. There were indeed British communities where people figured their situation literally couldn't get any worse. I couldn't even start to get my head around such thinking until I watched this, given that median wealth in the UK is twenty times the median wealth globally, though I tried to keep my own preferences (some would call them prejudices) out of the way enough to ensure that Can You Brexit was an even-handed look at the pros and cons.

I strive for an open mind on all issues, so it's only right to admit now that it's not all been bad news since the referendum. Admittedly the UK is considerably poorer as a result of leaving the EU's single market -- unnecessarily so, too, as the Norway model was an oft-touted Brexit plan among the more moderate of the Leave campaigners. But there are upsides. Immigration into the UK has increased since the Brexit vote and, contrary to the beliefs of the ship-'em-to-Rwanda mob, those immigrants are integrating well into British life and bring valuable skills, energy and culture. New citizens are also now coming from a wider diversity of backgrounds rather than just Europe. So that is good news, albeit the opposite of what most of the people voting Leave actually wanted.

By the 2010s the UK had long been in need of a way to break the old political mold. The main parties stood for fossilized versions of the socioeconomic classes of a century ago, not today's class structure, but Britain's first-past-the-post voting system prevented any reconfiguration of the parties to fit modern UK society. The Brexit vote had the effect of radically shaking up what the main parties stand for. The electorate would have done better to switch to an instant-runoff voting system when they had the chance in 2011, but that became another of history's missed opportunities. (See also the US Presidential election of 2000.)

Also, Britain seems to be escaping the trend towards nationalist populism (indeed, let's just call it fascism) that's surging across Europe. The British Isles have always been stony ground for fascists, and the Britain First party (whose leader has publicly supported lynch mobs) are faring no better among voters than Oswald Mosley's lot used to. Meanwhile, although the slightly less toxic Reform Party has been climbing a bit in the polls, that rise is largely matched by the decline in the Conservative Party's fortunes. Between them, Britain First and Reform are effectively Britain's far-right Tea Party/MAGA movement, liable to get noisily vexed about any measure that's even halfway sensible, informed, decent or rational. The greatest shame about their electoral alliance is that it's sullying the good Whig name of Reform, but eventually their supporters will get absorbed back into the Tories where their reactionary stridency will be dulled to a general grumble of dissatisfied resentment at the modern world. The example of Poland shows what harm can be done to the mechanism of state once you let people like the PiS stick their finger on the scales, but that threat seems far greater in many EU countries (and across the Atlantic, sadly) than in the UK.

Europe needs to worry about defence, of course, and while I preferred the days when Churchill could sell the concept of the Declaration of Union, post-Brexit Britain at least didn't vacillate in supporting Ukraine against Putin's invasion. It might make more sense to have a truly united European front, especially if Ukraine falls and Putin starts hoovering up the former Soviet states, and given that the next US President (and maybe the next French government) might be more pro-Putin than pro-NATO, but there's little sign that the EU as a whole is more alert to that threat than Britain is.

In another eight years, will I say that the Leave vote was a good idea? Steady on there. I'd still prefer my Enlightenment dream, but that might be one to put alongside the Mars colonies and controlled fusion for everybody and the von Neumann probes equipped with strong AI. At this point I'll settle for a world with fewer despots and more equality, and if getting that means distracting populists with some shiny trinkets like Brexit then so it goes.

It's been seven years since the United Kingdom narrowly voted to leave the European Union, of which it had been a leading member since 1973. This is usually nowadays referred to as Britain's Brexity McBrexitface moment.

What happened next? Those who subscribe to the idea that stories emerge as a series of dominoes falling in a cascade of events will have been interested and sometimes surprised - but not very surprised. It was obvious that Britain's ruling party would drift ever rightwards, colonizing the appeal-to-worst-natures territory staked out by the crackpot "UK Independence Party". Also obvious was that in trying to implement a bad idea with no plan, the Conservatives would suffer continual upheavals, internecine struggles, and desperate intrigues culminating in the blackly comical farce of a government led Boris Johnson followed by the utter madness of Liz Truss's ideological cloud-cuckoo land. As Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC puts it in an in-depth retrospective analysis:

"Her spectacular crash and burn was the logical end point, perhaps, of six years of chaos when the Conservatives so often turned in on themselves - and turned on each other."

Nobody likes a smart aleck, so I won't say told you so, but a lot of that crazed political backstabbing is right there in Can You Brexit (Without Breaking Britain)? There's also the opportunity to see if a better solution might have been found -- probably, indeed, the kind of solution Britain will now stagger towards over the next decade via a series of patches and ad hoc agreements that leave it only slightly worse off than if the whole sorry nonsense had never happened. 

Brexit didn't have to be bungled. It would have been perfectly legitimate to interpret the referendum result as an endorsement of the kind of "soft" Brexit that had been peddled to the electorate by Brexit advocates like Michael Gove, who during the referendum campaign proposed an EEA model such as Norway and Iceland enjoy that would have kept Britain in the Single Market. Instead the ERG cadre of self-proclaimed "Spartans" warped the ruling party, making dedication to their extreme version of Brexit a test of ideological purity. And that's why the party ended up in the hands of a succession of incompetents, malcontents, chancers, nutcases and idiots until finally lurching back towards its current attempt to look like grown-up government.

Given that other once-serious governments might shortly be jumping into the moronic inferno of populism, gamers from all around the world might want to take a look at this book to see if there are lessons to be learned. See if you can navigate the storms of political infighting to deliver a solution to Brexit that actually works in the interests of the people of Britain rather than the string of ex-Prime Ministers now collecting a few hundred grand each time they get up and give an after-dinner speech. It's possible, but it takes a more responsible hand on the rudder than any of the UK's leading politicians were willing to apply.

• Amazon US or Barnes & Noble
• Amazon UK or Blackwell's
• Canadian edition here.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be invited by Ralph Lovegrove onto his Fictoplasm podcast recently. Normally the structure of an episode involves Ralph reviewing a novel and then considering how it might inspire roleplaying games. Particularly recommended: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mythago Wood, The Tremor of Forgery, The Chronicles of Prydain, Kill the Dead, The Eclipse of the Century, Lyonesse, and Elric of Melnibone. Talking of that last one, Ralph is currently embarking on a marathon read-though of Moorcock classics, so stay tuned.


A previous guest on the Fictoplasm podcast was my wife Roz Morris so to balance things out I guess Ralph just had to ask me. Tune in here for our long discussion which takes in Brexit (鎖国), Tetsubo (鉄棒), my planned Sparta RPG (Λ), Mirabilis (☄), Frankenstein (🧠), Tirikelu (₸), and of course Jewelspider (💎🕷 or 宝石クモ, take your pick). We also talk about politics, gamebook design, the Congo, Nazis, Sagas of the Icelanders, and roleplaying in soon-to-be-sunken lands from Abraxas to Lyonesse but I've got no kanji or other symbols for those.

Jamie mentioned after listening to the podcast that I came across a bit like Tony Blair at times. Apparently he meant because of my vocal inflection rather than my politics. I suggested we might do a regular Fabled Lands podcast. (Jamie would be the Gordon Brown of the partnership, presumably.) So far I haven't been able to convince him, but maybe if there's enough demand...

In this standalone and not wholly serious scenario (see Postscript) the characters are loyal vassals of the young King Allandar who is trying to unite the dozen provinces of Meropis. The provinces were previously held together under a yoke of tyranny, and now that the tyrants have been defeated after a long war of liberation there is a risk of fragmentation.

The characters are the King’s paladins. Pre-generated characters are provided (links below) using GURPS. Each paladin is famous for his or her archetypal talent and from these talents are derived their nicknames:

• The Anvil 
• The Cunning 
• The Hunter 
• Silvertongue 
• Surefoot

Tell the players a few of the legends that are told of the paladins. When Silvertongue once dropped his sword in the middle of a fight, he convinced his opponent to give him his. The Hunter once read a message brought by a pigeon before the bird had alighted. The Anvil once held up a bridge while the King’s army crossed. And so on. It is up to you how much these stories are exaggerations.

Tell the players the nicknames and let them decide among themselves who will play which paladin. Once they have their character sheets (you can get those as PDFs from the links above) they can name their character -- eg Merivus the Cunning. Whatever they like. Then randomly hand to all paladins but the Anvil one of the four magic swords that are twins to Auric, the Sword of Light, wielded by the King:
The Sword of Justice
None can avoid justice. Finds weak points; half usual penalty when targeting chinks in armour (p400).

The Sword of Fire
Swift and deadly is this blade. You can make Whirlwind Attacks (p232) at -3 instead of -5.

The Sword of Lightning
No weapon strikes more swiftly; you can make Rapid Strikes at -4 instead of -6 (p370).

The Sword of Darkness
Strikes in a blur; your opponent is at an extra 50% penalty defending against Deceptive Attacks (p370).

This is a very highly structured adventure that is designed to be run in three hours. These are the story beats you’ll be aiming to hit:

• Arrive at the palace. Get the mission briefing: stop the rebels destroying signal towers.
• Go to Lord Garious. See pigs. Meet signal officer: told that the rebel leaders are children.
• Go to woods. Meet the children: told that Vitrine the Glass Witch is alive and in the area, waiting for her casque (armour) which has been reforged in Mount Holovar. (The rebels disabled the signal towers partly because they think the empire is in league with her.)
• Find Gall: told that Vitrine’s casque is being brought by the Bear of Drear via the Old Road that runs parallel to the main highway through the scrubland. Fight Vitrine’s emissaries. Discover the armour is fake – they’ve been duped. Real casque being brought by a flock of ravens direct to Garious’s keep. Back to Garious’s keep. Fight Vitrine herself.
• Discover the real mastermind was Gall. Try and recapture him.

The capital city of Meropis. As the characters approach the palace they see the signs of the long bitter siege: damaged buildings and people queuing for food.

Prisoners await judgement in the hastily-assembled courts. They hear grumbles that the soldiers of the Syndics have largely been allowed to integrate into the army (albeit on probation) and the only ones likely to be punished are the most senior officials.

The town crier is making some proclamations in the main square:

• Proselytising is now outlawed. The King wants to prevent religious schisms breaking up the empire.
• Users of magic must obtain a licence for any conjuration higher than the third decile of power.

These have no direct bearing on the adventure. They just serve to show the players how much remains to be done in winning the peace.

Also damaged by the fighting. The High Throne is covered, the Eye of Nephid on the wall now effaced.

After a three-year war, the young and idealistic King Allandar of Durdania has freed the dozen provinces of Meropis, driving out the Necromancers of Nephid who have ruled (via their puppets, the Syndics of Tasuun) for a hundred years.

As they arrive, the King is explaining the reconciliation policy to his councillors. They would rather round up and punish all collaborators, but he says that the infrastructure of the realm is fragile and they cannot afford to replace every lord who made an accommodation with the Syndics’ rule.


The King’s advisor is Doctor Kestrel (Merlin type) who explains the background to their mission:

“To ward against any possibility of counterattack from beyond the Black River we have been erecting signal towers across the empire. However, the rebels of Novaria have been attacking the work gangs and burning the towers. Their short-sightedness threatens the continued stability of the whole realm.”

The King: “Now we must unify and rebuild. The empire is on a knife edge, weak and battered after years of war. Novaria was sheltered from the worst excesses of the Syndics’ rule, and did not suffer from the desperate fighting that ravaged the eastern states. We need the grain and resources that Novaria can provide to build a better life for all our subjects.”




New signal towers being attacked suggests the enemy camp is in the fringes of the Tinarath Woods, close to the border with Novaria.

The characters arrive at the keep of Lord Garious, warden of the marches, formerly a lukewarm sympathizer with the deposed Syndics of Tasuun, who were Nephid’s puppet rulers. Can the characters trust him?

Garious keeps a stable of fine pigs who snuff out truffles for him – the source of his wealth. The characters are treated to truffles at dinner.

The keep is by the town of Periton. They ride into stone stables. A reek of pigsties (this is where you can mention the truffle pigs) is swiftly masked by the many barrels of apples that line the upper halls; Periton Keep is also famed for its cider.

Lord Garious greets them in a drawing room with a crackling fire and gable windows looking out north across the moors.

They meet Captain Terfin, who was in charge of one of the sacked signal towers. He says that the rebel leaders were children.


(I based Periton town and castle on Dunster, especially the stables.)



The Luttrell children are here with an airship (the Blighty). They expect to intercept Vitrine’s casque (suit of power armour) on the road.

On the ground: Freddy and Justin are with the troops. If attacked, they and their men (with a cry of “Scramble, chaps!”) ascend to the airship on individual balloons whose tethers they can cut quickly. To catch them you’d need to climb an adjacent tree really fast (as Surefoot could).

The airship Blighty nestles in a hollowed-out “crater” amid the treetops, so is not obvious till you’re up close.

Six soldiers rush forward to hold off the paladins while their comrades escape. A Tactics roll spots they are fighting defensively to buy time.


If they ascend to the airship, Mel Luttrell appears from the cabin and points an old WW1 Webley revolver at them. “If I pull this trigger, the stick will deal a sure death. But it contains only three such deaths, and I would sooner mete those deaths out to truly wicked foes who deserve them, so I’ll give you a chance to unhand my brother.”



The children accuse the empire (they call it the Meropi Empire) of trying to assassinate Queen Aphra. They are highly prejudiced against the empire, regarding the new king as barely an improvement on the Syndics. Of course, their thinking is coloured by the world they come from, where radical visionary politicians are distrusted with good reason. As evidence of the assassination plot they present a dagger with the royal crest. “This was coated in poison!” (It was stolen from the throne room a few weeks ago by Lord Garious.)

Assuming the characters can calm things down and a truce is agreed, the Luttrells explain a little of how they came here and, more importantly, their mission:

“Vitrine the Glass Witch yet lives. She is the last of the Necromancers. It was thought she had fled, since her condition makes her wary of battle, but now we know that her casque – the impervious body armour that protects her, which was believed destroyed – has been reforged in the fires of Mount Holovar. According to our portents, the casque is to be delivered to her here in the Marches. And soon.”


If any characters are injured, remember that the children have a healing salve (see earlier).


While they talk they have a chance of noticing a soft slithering or rustling (check Danger Sense too):


“The Glass Witch is said to be served by a woodland sprite!” gasps Mel.


Gall acts like a snivelling wretch and claims he serves Vitrine out of fear. “I’d like her dead too. One tap would shatter her – unless she gets her casque back. That’s what she calls her armour. It isn’t being brought on the highway, but on the Old Road that lies through the woods. But beware, for it is guarded by the Bear of Drear and Minister Midwinter.”


Snow starts to fall. This is the sorcery of Minister Midwinter, a demon that owes a service to Vitrine.

The characters need a tracking roll to find the Old Road (Gall will ingratiate himself by pointing them vaguely in the right direction) and it’s magical. If you step off the road, what is on it appears only as an intangible blur. Because of the snow, roll IQ to remain on it during a fight, or IQ+5 at other times.

The Bear of Drear is a huge mound of a monster that stinks of decay. Its fur is clumped and grimy with grave-mold, its skin slimy and pitted. It approaches accompanied by a thin blue figure and, behind them, a carriage like a hearse bearing an ornate mahogany casket.


Minister Midwinter, the aforementioned thin blue figure, stands to one side surrounded by a whirlwind of ice. To reach him: HT roll to endure biting cold, ST roll to push through the wind, then any hit will drive him off and you can see the Old Road clearly.

But when they have won, they find the carriage contains only an empty box.


High up in the sky they see a huge flock of ravens.





The ravens take their burden to the tower of the castle. As they arrive, Vitrine is already armouring up (you know, like this).


She first telekinetically lifts the cobbles from the main street (or courtyard) and these hang in the air, shooting in volleys at the characters: 2d6 each round, subtract armour and shield.

Then she starts a storm gathering, which after six rounds allows her to cast lightning bolts in addition to other actions.

Then she conjures a sickle (2d+2 cut) and whip (1d+5 cr, and HT or double damage) made of coruscating silver-green energy with which she fights (both weapons each round, skill 15).

She has 20-point armour but, in effect, a single Hit Point.


After defeating Vitrine, they find a shoot and gall lodged inside her shattered glass skull. The true mastermind was Gall, who took control of the witch after the other Necromancers fell. But Gall has got away. In fact he’s burrowed underground and the only chance of finding him now is to use one of the truffle pigs (though a Perception roll beating a critical of 6 on 17 will at least confirm he can’t have got outside a perimeter).


Can they reconcile the King and the rebels?

Can they help the Luttrell children go home? (One way to get them home would be if Silvertongue plays a tune to animate the rope again.)

It's not expected they'll necessarily do this within the three-hour gaming session, but if not then they'll have something to think about afterwards.


I wrote the adventure as a birthday surprise for the 13-year-old son of a gaming buddy. The concept was simply: what if you experienced Narnia from the other side? Knowing I'd only have three hours to run it in, I abandoned my usual freeform approach and scripted it like a story -- not something I'd do often, but this time it worked. If Narnia isn't your bedknobs, here are some alternative sources for inspiration.

The hot news today (well, it's been a bit quiet) is that Britain's prime minister, Bojo the Clown, has been watching his favourite movie. Take a guess. Darkest Hour? Churchill? No, it's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It reminded me of a prophetic scene in Can You Brexit? where PM is relaxing with a spot of high fantasy escapism:



Johnson's choice of viewing comes as no surprise when you realize that his childhood ambition (ie just before he was made leader of the Nasti Party) was to be world king. And he made it, almost, because whenever he's on TV the name Cnut springs to mind. But let's not be too hard on him; there are far less qualified wannabe world kings out there.

There's little point in trying to flog Can You Brexit? now, I guess. People think that the pandemic has made the whole question of Brexit irrelevant. So I'll just say that Spanish Flu didn't negate the consequences of World War 1, and point out that if you want to give a non-fantasy, halfling-free gamebook a go, it's still on sale and you can also play it for free here using the character sheet here. Bonus points if you can salvage Britain's national health service from the current crisis. Come to that, bonus points if you can salvage Britain.



Anyway, enough of Lord of the Rings and of UK politics. Be here on Friday when we're off on a one-shot roleplaying adventure set in a whole other fantasy land. You won't want to miss "The Only Way Is Narnia".

At the end of this month, British government departments will stop using the word "Brexit", on the grounds that Brexit is over and done with from January 31st. It won't be, of course -- the negotiations and patches will take years, the consequences last for decades -- but we're in Ingsoc territory now. The Ministry of Truth doesn't even want talk of "negotiations" (ignorance is strength) as that would make the British people realize that the hard part is only just beginning.

As I write this, in a deliciously ironic touch given that the Leave campaign repeatedly complained about the "unelected" officials of the EU, the prime minister has been on holiday in the Caribbean for 40% of his total time in office and his special adviser Dominic Cummings (unelected boss of government strategy) is looking to hire uneducated cranks to bypass the UK civil service and carry on Cummings's favourite pastime of playing with fire without knowing that fire is hot. It's a strategy that hasn't been tried since Stalin, so what could possibly go wrong?

Jamie and I are wondering whether we now need to prove our patriotism by issuing a new edition of our last gamebook: Can You Do The Thing Previously Known As Brexit? But maybe that tumbril has already trundled. I do wish we had indulged some of our original plans for the book. In the first draft it opened on a crashing plane. You woke up in the cockpit but had no recollection of how to fly the thing. That established a framing narrative to which you'd return throughout the book, with increasingly surreal (or possibly increasingly lucid) episodes such as:

• Remainers hiding in priest holes in Elizabethan times. 
• The mutineers on Pitcairn island having “done away with the experts”. 
• Conversations with the Number 10 cat.
• Facts trying to escape across the English Channel in rubber dinghies.

And concluding with the prime minister (ie you, the reader) watching the trial of Orestes from The Eumenides, only in this version the Furies win the vote by 13 to 12 thanks to blatant lies yelled out by the Chorus.

"Too wacky," Jamie said, and at the time I agreed. That was before reality, out of its head on drugs, came charging up from behind, shoved reason into a ditch, and ran off laughing. Now even Armando Iannucci has given up on satire ("politics feels fictional enough") and for all I know Chris Morris might very well be thinking of applying to become one of Cummings's galley slaves. (Spoiler: he'll be disqualified on the grounds of having a university degree and being sane. Too bad, as if he worked in Downing Street he's just the chap to pull off a metaphorical Calò.)



If you'd like to wind back to an earlier era when Brexit was still about how to negotiate a rational relationship with the European Union that would reflect the electorate's narrow preference for withdrawal, you can try your hand at that in the book. Future generations will marvel that logic and facts ever played any part in the process, given the political maelstrom that actually ensued. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to send my CV off to Mekonta.



Also available from Amazon in Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Spain, Netherlands and anywhere that books aren't burned. And talking of the Furies vs Athena:



ADDENDUM (January 31): Professor Chris Grey has written a summary of how we got to this point. Only of historical interest now, at least until Tim Harford turns it all into one of his Cautionary Tales in 10 or 15 years' time...

I knew if I waited long enough Brexit would give me something to laugh about, and this video is worth the price of -- admission isn't the right word, I guess. The opposite.

If you've been curious about my and Jamie's new gamebook Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? now is your chance to try it out as a free online PDF. (Oh, and incidentally if you need to backtrack you can use Alt + left arrow in a PDF just like the Back button in a browser. That's for PCs. There are options for other devices but you don't need me to tell you about those; you've got the internet after all.)

Share the PDF if you like. This book took us a year to write and, although I'm aware most gamebook readers would rather we'd done something with goblins, I think it's kind of important. Possibly the most worthwhile book we've written, in fact. With just six months to go before the UK and the EU part company, we now just want as many people as possible to get the chance to play it. And don't be put off by the sheer mind-crushing horror of Britain's current political fubar. Can You Brexit? may not be quite as laugh-out-loud as the Titanic video, but we've done our best to inject it with plenty of humour along with all the informative stuff.

And the print book is still on sale for another six months if digital gaming just doesn't do it for you:



And finally, as the newscasters used to say, there's this too. Oh, I can see Brexit is going to usher in a whole new era of deliciously bitter satire:

I haven't played it, so don't take this as an endorsement, but indie developer Panic Barn have announced a "post-Brexit Papers Please" called Not Tonight. Apparently they're expecting "a flurry of negative reviews". Well, all publicity is good publicity, so that's a better thing to hope for than the crashing silence Jamie and I got in response to Can You Brexit?

Probably the mistake we made is that we made our political gamebook (there's a very nice custom "character sheet" for it here, incidentally) fairly balanced. The media really aren't interested in something unless it gets them spitting with outrage. You can judge for yourself in this episode of the Brave New Words podcast from Starburst magazine. The presenters start the show with a trigger warning, if that's any guide.

Speaking of trigger warnings, the trailer above opens with footage of Nigel Farage. In my house that can provoke a reaction that scares cats and breaks crockery. But hey, your tolerance levels may be different.

Other interactive things I haven't played include Charlie Higson's stab at a Fighting Fantasy book, The Gates of Death. It's for younger kids than the original '80s FF fandom - or maybe kids are just kiddier these days. Anyway, apparently that means fewer gory/scary encounters and more pop culture references and bottom jokes. Try it on your kids and see what they think. You may first need to convince them it's not a Miss Marple mystery, though, judging by the cover design.

I'm told by Mark Lain, aka Malthus Dire, that his gamebook Destiny's Role is the first of a planned series. There is very little about it on the web, but from the Amazon product page I've gleaned that this book comprises four different adventures in different genres, including a noir-style private dick scenario. (That's dick as in detective, of course, not what it would mean in a Higson book.) Marco Arnaudo's video review below should give you an idea of what the adventures are like.


French company Celestory, who seem to be a European answer to Choice of Games, have announced a forthcoming academic book called Interactive Story which will be published in both Europe and the US around Christmas 2018..

And while we're doing a round-up of games and gamebooks, let me put in another plug for Martin Noutch's excellent Steam Highwayman, in part inspired by Keith Roberts' SF classic Pavane. The Highwayman is building up pressure for another outing, so if you're a Fabled Lands player and you're into steampunk, this is for you.

Gilbert and Sullivan. Lennon and McCartney. Lee and Ditko… In many successful creative partnerships you can perceive two quite different impulses at work, impulses which might be expected to pull in opposite directions and tear the project apart but in fact the result ends up being something greater than either might have achieved on their own.

It's the underlying principle of the Hegelian dialectic. Start with thesis, move on to antithesis, and in the fusion of those you might make something original and meaningful. (Luck plays a part too, but I don't think Hegel covered that.)

Thesis and antithesis is pretty much how Can You Brexit? came about. While sketching out the planned structure of the book, I'd only dimly considered what the style and tone of the writing would be. I wrote an opening that was surreal rather than laugh-out-loud funny -- more Theatre of Cruelty than Spitting Image -- and I envisaged the pinch points in the narrative being increasingly disturbing episodes between sections that would be largely informative.

But then when Jamie Thomson came in as co-author, he reminded me of something I should never have forgotten: if you want to keep people's attention you need to entertain them. Jamie rewrote the opening with the sort of comedy flair that gets audiences laughing helplessly at the best political satires. Where I'd have gone New Statesman, he took it in the direction of Private Eye.

You might think these two different sensibilities could not coexist. On the one hand a serious analysis of political and economic reality, on the other a fast-paced and funny narrative with twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat. They mesh because we each share some of the other's approach Jamie can drill down into political detail with just as much rigour as me. And when we write a script, I come up with as many of the gags as he does. It's just that each of us takes the champion role for one of those two things That's what makes the difference between creative conflict and creative cohesion.

Comedy doesn't mean a work of art can't be serious; it just stops it being sombre. Something can be thought-provoking without becoming dry and boring. When you can get people laughing you're waking their minds up too. So a reader who you are entertaining with the writer's whole orchestra, everything from intellect through passion to humour, is a reader who'll give you their full attention. That's a lesson more politicians could do with learning.

Talking of which, if you live in the United Kingdom you'll know we have local elections coming up next week. Brexit remains the issue that will probably have the greatest impact on the country over the rest of my life, so I'll be voting on the basis of what the parties have to say about that. But whatever criteria you use, do go and vote. If nothing else, it's how we earn the right to have a grumble.


Also available from Amazon in Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Spain, Netherlands -- oh, and just about anywhere.

People keep asking when Jamie and I are going to write another gamebook, and after twenty-two years we finally have. It’s called Can You Brexit (Without Breaking Britain)? and the story begins on the day in 2017 that the UK gave notice of its intention to quit the European Union.

You play the Prime Minister and you have two years (played out over four six-monthly “game turns”) to negotiate Britain’s future relationship with the union of which it has been a member since 1973. Imagine a divorce settlement after forty-five years of marriage, multiply by a half a billion people, add a poisonous cauldron of political ideology, raise to boiling point with a baying partisan press that's way off to the right of Attila the Hun, and you’ll have some idea of how smoothly those talks are going to go.

In Can You Brexit? there are ten main issues to be negotiated (residency rights for EU citizens living in Britain, security & defence arrangements post-Brexit, the National Health Service, etc) and you only have time to oversee a few of those issues in person; the rest are delegated to your ministers. So you have to manage your time while trying to prevent the four metrics (Authority, Economy, Popularity and Goodwill) from going into a tailspin.

Describing it like that makes it sound dry. It’s not. Think Veep or The Thick of It (or, for older readers, Yes Minister) rather than House of Cards or The West Wing. (Not that those last two are dry either, but you know what I mean.) At the same time, we aimed to make the game part of it informative and factually accurate. Perhaps the best comparison is Private Eye, with its blend of blistering satire, nose-tweaking mischief, and hard-nosed determination to speak truth to power. Jamie did win the 2012 Roald Dahl Funny Prize, after all, so trust me, you'll be entertained as well as informed.

Only hours after our agent sent the manuscript out to publishers he was getting replies that described it as brilliant. One editor phoned up the next day to say she’d read it and thought it was a work of genius. There’s a but. None of London’s top publishers took it – and to explain why an editor’s wild enthusiasm for a book could be shot down so easily by the acquisitions committees that make these decisions I’d have to give you a crash course in how modern publishing works. But here's a typical response that we got a month on:

“I loved the idea and I promptly sent it round to all my colleagues. I was particularly taken by the level of effort Dave and Jamie have put into it. Added to which, they write really well (the Yes Minister comparison was a good one). I’m afraid where it foundered for us was the horrible greyness of Brexit itself. The book is very funny but the thought of imagining yourself into running the debacle is enough to make anyone want to hide in a cupboard – so I’m not convinced that the coverage I could definitely see this book getting would lead to proper sales… and I’m afraid they all agreed. So I’m afraid in the end we are going to pass, even though there is something essentially very brilliant about the book. It is a great project that definitely deserves success. ”

That's publishers these days. Always willing to back something they truly believe in, just so long as there's absolutely no risk attached. Pass me the spittoon. Luckily Jamie and I have our own small publishing imprint, so the fruit of a year’s labour doesn’t have to be cast into a desk drawer. I realize it’s not shotgunning zombies or looting dragon hoards, but if you want to see what a gamebook for grown-ups looks like, this one's for you.

And as an antidote to all those naysayers in publishing, who really just want a TV celeb to offer them a book about cats and Brexit, we got this cheering endorsement from my good friend Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and presenter of BBC Radio's More or Less.

“A wholly original approach to the big question of our times, this book educates, entertains, and also achieves the seemingly impossible feat of making you empathise with Theresa May. It reminded me of Yes Minister: it made me laugh, but then it made me think.”

Also available in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia. Find more about it on Gamebook News.