Following my first "random bookshop puchase" of the year earlier in the week, I have now made my first "random online purchase" of a book: Ultimate Football Heroes – Goal Machine (Career Mode).
Costing mere pence more than the hardback book I got at the weekend, this is not a typical "choose your own adventure" book. There are (I'm guessing) no dragons or magic items in this one. Instead, it capitalises on my newly invigorated interest in football.
Like a great many kids, over several generations, I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons-inspired gamebooks where you selected which page your adventurer would go to next, depending on the options offered at the end of your current location.
Generally, there was randomness, fighting, limited statistics etc to stress the danger of the situation your character found themselves in - be it searching an abandoned spaceship, avoiding ghosts in a haunted mansion or delving into a dungeon.
From what I can see in Goal Machine - and I realise I am way older than the target demographic - character creation is 'limited' to giving your in-book persona and their team names, and designing warm-up and first team strips. Everything else, as you progress through the story, is purely down to your choices.
And I'm okay with that. I'm interested to see what twists and turns Roland Hall's gamebook takes me on during my journey from the "playground to the pitch".
It'll also be a chance to revive (to some degree) my old Subbuteo team, Pogle Rovers, if I can just remember what their team colours were. I'm pretty sure I had a team of Feyenoord miniature players that doubled as Pogle Rovers, but I'll have to rack my brains a bit harder to double check.