I spend a weird amount of time thinking about narrative in board games. So maybe it isn’t a surprise that I was drawn to Hildegard, the second entry in Greg Favro’s Spire’s End series, in which the obvious touchstone is choose-your-own-adventure books. You know, those things everybody cheated through as a kid.

Reading CYOA cards.

For those who might have missed out, choose-your-own-adventure books were “gamebooks” that saw readers making decisions at the bottom of the page. Like many of us, the creator of the format, Edward Packard, would read bedtime stories to his daughters, but sometimes found his creative wellspring running dry. Instead of coming up with new adventures, he left crucial decisions up to the girls. They made a choice, which led to another few paragraphs of adventure, then to another decision, and on and on.

In print, the concept wasn’t quite so freeform. At the bottom of each page, players would be given two or three decisions, each leading to another page. The physical act of turning through the book constituted the gameplay. Some authors experimented with denser material, although with some notable exceptions, such as Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy books, these efforts usually proved too challenging for the mass market. But while the gameplay was more limited than Packard’s story sessions with his kids, the format stuck around for 184 installments through Bantam Books — Packard wrote around 50 of them — plus plenty of spinoffs and imitators by authors like R.L. Stine.

Greg Favro more or less sticks to the format. As the titular character, you’re tasked with delivering a package to a distant town. Mechanically, it isn’t far removed from flipping pages. You draw a card, read a snippet of story, and then make a decision that leads to another card. The entire game is structured across four chapters, each consisting of around a hundred cards, although the branching nature of the narrative means you’ll only see a fraction of those in any given playthrough.

From one perspective, Favro’s approach is even more limited than those old gamebooks. Only so much material can fit onto a single card, trimming the narrative to its barest outline. It’s more linear than many CYOA books, and more than once I came across story beats that would have benefited from — dare I say it — more fluff.

At the same time, putting the story on cards lets Favro tinker with the format. Your first card, for example, is drawn at random from a selection of three, prompting minor differences in how your adventure begins. That trick is repeated a few times throughout the story, injecting some uncertainty into the reader’s decisions. Meanwhile, because cards can be removed from the deck more easily than pages can be torn from a book (or at least less destructively), they can be stockpiled as reminders of previous story beats. These tags might be invoked later, providing new routes as you progress through the story. Your character therefore carries an inventory that consists not only of tangible goods like your money, weaponry, and a trusty fishing rod, but also intangible benefits like relationships, accomplishments, and personal beefs.

Taking this even further, Favro injects actual game systems into the mix. Combat isn’t merely described but played out as a series of dice rolls, some more expansive than others, letting you snipe a heckler, retrieve an out-of-reach object, or engage in miniature boss battles. It’s a smooth enough system, with little keywords that modify or hobble your rolls or those of your enemies. Which isn’t to say it’s all that engaging. More than once, I groaned when another roll appeared. Favro tries to add some resource management, letting you spend marksman tokens earned from previous combats, but these options are pricey and therefore few and far between.

In the long run, this compounds the game’s biggest misstep, albeit a misstep that’s hardly its creator’s fault: its tendency to produce expected outcomes. Pulling the right card or rolling the right faces leads to success, while stumbles produce setbacks or even outright failure. This endows the game with an inexorable logic, but does little to make it exciting or surprising. Worse, because the same currency you spend to improve your chances in battle come from succeeding in battle — as opposed to failing a roll or something — it’s common to find oneself circling the drain after only one or two inopportune flubs. Again, that’s entirely logical, but not especially interesting. A handful of recent narrative games, many of them CRPGs like Disco Elysium or Baldur’s Gate 3, have demonstrated how failure can be used to unlock unexpected narrative avenues, not to mention produce uncommon emotions like humor or empathy. In some cases, these games allow a failed roll to produce the absolute best outcome. Again, this isn’t a shortcoming on Favro’s part; I recognize I’m wishing the game had done something unconventional. But despite its roots in CYOA novels, which often treated their readers to the unexpected, Hildegard is decidedly traditional, hewing closer to the rolls of a dungeon crawl than the narrative twists of a well-written adventure.

Which is precisely why I cheated like a devil while playing it.

The dice battles are fine.

If you’ve ever read a choose-your-own-adventure book, there’s a very good chance you cheated. If you didn’t, I would submit that you didn’t experience them at their best, or even as they were intended. When everybody was reading the things in the ’90s, it wasn’t uncommon to glance at the kids seated in the school library and see everyone bookmarking pages with five or six contorted fingers. When a decision led to one of those dreaded THE END pages, you would rewind. When an interesting crossroads presented itself — especially if it was one you hadn’t uncovered before — you jammed a pinkie into it.

Not too long ago, I was playing the digital version of Isaac Childres’s Gloomhaven. There were a number of improvements to the analog format. Not setting up was a boon, for one thing, and it was nice to get an immediate ruling on certain line-of-sight questions, ability triggers, or enemy behaviors. At the same time, the experience was profoundly dissatisfying. Before reaching the point I had petered out in my analog campaign, I quit and uninstalled the whole thing.

The problem? I couldn’t cheat.

Of course, this is an issue of degrees. I’m not talking about malicious cheating, since there are no other players. Nor am I talking about bending the system until it’s too easy. Rather, I’m talking about correcting a misstep after clicking the wrong hex, or fixing those “oh shoot” moments when you discard the wrong ability even though you fully intended to toss a different card, or realizing you misread an enemy’s movement range from across the table and deciding to step back a square. When played on the table, Gloomhaven is a game that allows the players some latitude. And no surprise: it’s both heavy on the rules and punishing as a dungeon crawler and a combat puzzle. Ensuring that a party’s challenge arises from the game and not the interface is entirely fair. My rule of thumb is that if I would let somebody take back a move in a multiplayer game, why not allow it here?

But Gloomhaven’s sole concession to those missteps was to restart the entire scenario. To some degree, I understand that decision. Thanks to how its combat modifiers function, Gloomhaven would be readily save-scummed. Except… why not allow that, too? There’s no harm in it, especially in the age of ironman modes. One of the reasons I play CRPGs and tabletop games alike is because they let me bookmark pages with my metaphorical fingers. If something hampers my enjoyment, whether it’s a misclick or wanting to experiment, I’ll gladly rewind to a previous save-state.

Over the course of my two playthroughs of the campaign, Hildegard’s second attempt was filled with such rewinds. In the second chapter, I took two entirely distinct routes out of curiosity alone. Later, when a bad roll ended the game, did I pack it up and start over from scratch, or even the beginning of the chapter? Heck no. I tipped over a die so it showed the face that would win me the combat and flip the next encounter.

I’m divided on how I feel about this. Not on the cheating. I love the cheating. Rather, on the need to cheat. To some degree, I appreciate it. I like that Hildegard got me invested enough to place a card off to the side to explore another avenue. Its world is thinly drawn and filled with non sequiturs — why is a scarecrow throwing cobs of corn at me? — but Hildegard is a plucky character, the sort of person who’s easy to root for, and it’s not like I want more exposition anyway. Why an animated scarecrow? I dunno. Why not an animated scarecrow?

At the same time, Hildegard also highlights some of the weaknesses with board game narratives. Because it’s a board game in addition to a CYOA story, its emphasis on “winning” and “losing” encounters becomes an overly tight jacket zipped up to the collar. To function as a good game according to conventional wisdom, it includes thresholds and win states and all those other things that qualify it as a game. But this stands at odds with the need to function as a good story, one that permits setbacks and character growth that isn’t a straight line moving forever upward. The outcome is an awkward amalgamation of two distinct formats, as most narrative games are, lurching between one and the other as though propelled by two different vehicles entirely.

Favro wrings as much space from his dice battles as he can.

Hence the cheating. Because while it makes sense for the game to shove me to the curb for not winning every engagement, it doesn’t always make sense for a story to do so.

In the end, I came away wishing for a whole laundry list of things. That Hildegard was more playful with its narrative format. That our hobby would wrestle against its inherited restraints more often. That we would learn the lessons of TTRPGs and CRPGs and other interactive modes of storytelling. Above all, that I could say this particular journey had made me want to return to its world. Instead, I cheated so I wouldn’t have to.

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