Alea Jacta Est!

Translating into English as "the die is cast", if you didn't know, Alea jacta est! was a four-volume series of adventure gamebooks starring the famous indomitable Gauls published in France in 1988, with three of the entries being translated into English a year or two down the line; the original Latin title remains on the cover, but each book is also billed under the rather less imaginative heading of "An Asterix Game Book". The books boasted a full combat and inventory system, and directly mashed together the appearance of a regular Asterix comic album with the functionality of an adventure gamebook, using a mixture of text sections and puzzles based around illustrations. The English translations were done by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, who so brilliantly translated the original comics, which gives these versions a great sense of authenticity. And the series might very well be one of the most successful marriages of an existing property to the adventure gamebook format. But given such a category also includes Give Yourself Goosebumps, The Famous Five and You and Dick Tracy: A Catch-a-Crook Adventure, that doesn't seem like a terribly high bar to clear. So, what's it like?

On the subject of authorship, the only authors credited are Goscinny and Uderzo, with copyright given to Uderzo's publishing house, Éditions Albert René -- it seems unlikely to me that Uderzo himself actually wrote the gamebook part, and most if not all of the internal illustrations are recycled from Asterix albums, often with the text changed to better fit their new context (there's the occasional one I can't place to a specific book which tellingly looks a little off-model), so Uderzo's involvement may have been limited to providing the cover art and the major illustrations for puzzles, where they couldn't just recycle from the albums. (The first book uses a very un-Asterix-like font for cases where the text has been changed from the recycled panels, but the other ones use the 'standard' one.) The splash page bills it as "Goscinny and Uderzo Present an Asterix Game Book", which is startlingly similar to how most Fighting Fantasy books were billed as "Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone Present", and is perhaps a tacit admission of a ghostwriter. (The back cover of the first one also uses the Fighting Fantasy tagline "You Are the Hero!", oddly enough!)

All four books (including the one never translated into English -- the title for that one translated as as The Great Game, and I have no idea why it didn't get an English version, but you can see the cover here at Demian's Gamebook Webpage) cast the player as Justforkix, Chief Vitalstatistix's nephew who appeared in the album Asterix and the Normans, with this series acting as a vague sort of sequel to that entry (with many other continuity references and returning characters from other stories) -- after his encounter with the Normans, Justforkix is striking out in search of adventure! The aforementioned combat/inventory system I don't need to break down into minute detail, but it's very detailed and a little reminiscent of series such as Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf -- these are proper gamebooks, not a cheap cash-in on pre-existing IP. The three English-language ones are all pretty substantial, running to 334, 216 and 338 sections respectively. (Each book is, unusually for a solo adventure gamebook, split up into chapters, meaning each book is essentially several different mini-adventures.)

The more typical sections of the adventures are fine, but I've always found something a bit odd about text stories based on comic books. Have you ever heard any of those old Asterix cassette releases where Willie Rushton would read a prose version of one of the albums, as adapted by Bell & Hockridge? (There's a few of them on YouTube, go and look them up, they're a fascinating curio.) I find my reaction to this much the same -- I like it, it just feels a bit strange experiencing something that usually relies so strongly on visuals in a text-only format. I admit this might just be me being weird. Where the books really shine are where the puzzles, games and maps use the illustrations. See, for example, choosing where to sit at a tavern in The Meeting of the Chieftains:

It's not like you couldn't convey the same information in text, but the results wouldn't be nearly so pleasing. Here's one more I particularly like, from the same book:

Overall, these are pretty good! The recycled art can be obvious when you've read the original albums enough to immediately identify which page of which book they originally come from, but they seem to have been carefully chosen so you don't, for example, have a panel from Asterix the Gaul next to one drawn almost thirty years later, and the changing of the text to insert new jokes and context can be pretty clever (quite possibly better than the original French, in some cases). All the other production values are high -- I particularly like the adventure sheet (or Adventure Slab, in this case) and random number table included as playing aids.

Conclusions: Recommended for Asterix fans, or gamebook fans, or Asterix gamebook fans.