TSR, $2.00, ISBN o-88038-036-5
Sci-fi, 1983

You are Terry Morton, a kid who is some kind of genius when it comes to robots, and your friend is Dennis, who is into chemistry. Naturally, this means that you can program robots on the fly while Dennis has with him all kinds of chemicals that can knock people out and do other things that must surely be illegal. Together with your dog Rusty, which thankfully can’t talk, you are trying to enjoy what time you have together before you have to head off home for the rest of the year. Well, it’s going to be a holiday to remember when you find yourself pitted against Max and some nefarious people as they break into your father’s robot factory.

Robbers and Robots is another novel passed off as a gamebook – you will be reading reams after reams of text for more often than making decisions – so in many ways it’s an Endless Quest gamebook alright. The plot is far less fantasy or sci-fi than the title may lead you to believe, as the whole thing feels like something that was created for the Choose Your Own Adventure line, only to be modified slightly and sold to this line instead. The narrative is far better than that in many gamebooks of that other line, however. There are some pretty evocatively-written scenes here and there. Hence, this being a better novel than a gamebook!

Is this a great campaign? Well, it makes for a decent story if you like tales of kids who can MacGyver better than MacGyver being pitted against overweight and ugly villains. The bad endings here feel more final than most gamebooks in this line, but the campaign overall is pretty easy. Just don’t do anything too stupid and you’d be fine. This means that while this campaign isn’t particularly awful, it’s also not particularly great either. It’s an easy come, easy go gamebook – you may have some fun with it, but you likely won’t recall much of it after you’re done with it. The short length of many of the routes present here doesn’t help in that regard.