My First Adventure: The Odyssey of Phobos

I’ve talked about the My First Adventure series before but I just got a review copy of My First Adventure: The Odyssey of Phobos from Fable Fox Press, which has three of the books available in the US! Previously I had gotten Finding the Dragon on Amazon and imported both Discovering Atlantis and Journey to Ochre Land from Zatu Games, so I was super excited to hear that Fable Fox Press is making more available in the US! Although the other two they have are the ones I already had bought

The series is a choose-your-own-adventure type book for kids. My 5yo kids have loved them since they were 2 – I read the stories to them. The way the books work is there are choices to make and the pages are split so you only turn the part of the page with the choice you make. You get items which you mark on dials in the corner of the pages, and later on choices can use those items to get good things – you usually want all 3 (or avoid all 3 bad things) for a good ending.

The Odyssey of Phobos is a story where you’re a crew on a spaceship and need to fix your robot friend. It seems more involved than the previous ones I have, and I like the variety. Firstly, the things you collect aren’t all the same type of thing, and at the end when you get your ending, there are some differences based on what type of thing you got. Also there are a lot of pages for the good ending so it’s longer than I’m used to! Another thing is that in the other books you always get all the items first, and then it has challenges for them after that. In this book it had only two items before the first challenge, so at first I thought I had skipped a page. But it worked with the story and it was refreshing to have a slightly different format.

I think this might be my favorite of the series after Finding the Dragon. My kids are definitely liking it as their bedtime story – a bonus is that one of the characters has the same name as my husband so they like playing as that character and having my husband read it to them! We haven’t read all the choices yet so part of my enjoyment is that it hasn’t gotten repetitive for me yet, but I do like the changes from previous ones.

I did get this one for free from Fable Fox Press, but I bought the other ones (and I’m planning on buying another one and the puzzle one from Zatu soon since those aren’t in the US).