Combat Heroes was a fun experiment in game design by Joe Dever and released in 1986. Each book was a pick-your-path story told mostly through illustrations. Each Combat Heroes book showed you a fantasy world, which you explored through a navigational system that guided you to a corresponding page with a different view of your surroundings depending on which way you moved. It was the analog version of a classic point-and-click adventure game on a computer, and it worked pretty well. To me, the Combat Heroes books are engaging and captivating stories, and I recently purchased the whole set (it's just 4 books) so I could play them again.
When I was a kid trying as hard as I could to get into Dungeons & Dragons in the midst of the actual Satanic Panic, I managed to talk my parents into buying Combat Heroes 1: Black Baron. Luckily for me, they didn't recognise the book as a roleplaying product because it looked like a standard trade paperback. It started with text, finished with text, and in the middle there were a bunch of pictures of fantasy warriors. To my parents, it must have looked lot like the Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian and Batman stuff I was so often reading. There's a banner on the front cover, proclaiming the book as a roleplaying game, but I guess it was safe as long as it didn't say "dungeons" or "dragons".
On its own, a Combat Heroes book is a solo game. Intriguingly, each Combat Heroes has a companion book that makes it into a 2-player game. This greatly confounded me as a kid, and I don't think I ever played the solo game correctly. Actually, the solo and 2-player modes are a false dichotomy. There's not actually any integration between the two modes, so you just ignore half the pages in the book while playing one mode or the other.
Solo game
In the solo game, which is the one I'm most familiar with because it's invariably the best mode for the books, you're an adventure trying to escape a castle maze or flying an airship around a fantasy world. After reading the introduction for context, you're sent to a page depicting your starting view, and then you use a compass at the bottom of the page to decide which way to go. Go to one page to turn right, go to another page to turn left, and so on. There are traps and items to explore, which sometimes require you to read numbered narrative descriptions in the back of the book. When you find all the items you need to escape the castle in Black Baron and White Warlord, or find the crystal you're seeking in Scarlet Sorcerer and Emerald Enchanter, you win the game. Should you lose too much Endurance along the way, you perish.
Mechanically, game play is maybe even easier than a Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf book. It's just as satisfying, so long as you have an active imagination.
As with many old games, playing it today means you have to embrace the idea of permadeath. When you die in this book, you're expected to go all the way back to the beginning to start again. That's just the way games used to be designed, and admittedly it fits the medium well. I don't think anybody actually played that way, even back in 1986. Of course you'd put a bookmark in your previous location so you could backtrack in case of death. I do the same thing today, marking down each death on my character sheet just for the sake of good accounting.
While you may well cheat death, you're still likely to find that the book is good for several play-throughs. Joe Dever packs a surprising amount of adventure in just half a book of illustrations. There were several game sessions when I was just too close to success to risk rummaging around in a cabinet or taking a detour between me and my immediate goal. All those missed opportunities from one game session are material for your next one.
2-player game
Each Combat Heroes book has a companion book. The theory was, I think, that you could buy one book and a friend could buy the other book, and then you could duel against one another. Then you could each play the solo game a few times, and then swap books and play that solo game a few times. It's almost an inordinate amount of game play for the price.
As a kid, I didn't have any friends who happened to own Combat Heroes 1: White Warlord. It took me decades to acquire the other Combat Heroes books, and then to find someone to play against. I recently played against my partner, though, with her playing the White Warlord and me playing the Black Baron. Unfortunately, I found the 2-player version of the game comparatively dull to what I'd grown used to from the solo version.
I the solo game, you're on a quest. In both book sets, you're searching for items, which forces you to explore and investigate and read snippets of lore and story. You can play for hours and hours, finding new places on the map, and reverse engineering the path to get you to that one last narrative description you somehow still haven't encountered. It's engaging and endlessly fascinating, and then you put the book down for a few years and come back to it having forgotten everything, and so you do it all over again.
In the 2-player mode, you and your opponent are exclusively hunting each other down. When you find one another, you take a swipe at each other and then retreat to safety. And then you repeat the process.
That's pretty much all you do. There's not much of a narrative, there's not much interaction with the environment, and no story aside from the initial premise.
It's a clever system, and I still marvel at the seemingly impossible way the books integrate with one another. The mechanics are good, and it very sensibly implements a turn structure so you and your friend aren't just flipping pages at random times. The only problem is that it eventually just feels like a game of Battleship, with each player wandering around blindly until they spot their enemy.
On the one hand, I can imagine a 2-player mode that integrates the solo game's story. On the other hand, the game must have been complicated enough already without trying to add even more complexity to the game play. When I played, our game lasted for too long and my partner eventually gracefully stood by while I dispatched the White Warlord just so somebody would win. A very different experience from solo mode.
Go on an adventure
Joe Dever only released 4 books in the Combat Heroes series, and they're long out of print now. I found some books in second-hand bookshops, and others on an Internet auction site, and for me it's well worth owning the full set. I haven't decided yet whether I'll try 2-player mode again, but playing solo is both nostalgic and genuinely a lot of fun. If you're looking for a game book that takes the pick-your-path model and does something completely different with it, then you ought to try at least one of the Combat Heroes books.