Book Review: Roll for Danger – The Cursed Catacombs by Nick Eliopulos

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The Details

Media Type: Physical Book (ARC)
Title: Roll for Danger – The Cursed Catacombs
Author(s): Nick Eliopulos
Publisher: Disney Hyperion
Pages/Length: Hardcover; 272 pages
Release Date: July 22, 2025
Source: Publisher/TLC Book Tours

Add it on: Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

Adventure awaits in this middle-grade fantasy series that invites young readers to step into the shoes of of the story’s hero! Combining elements of table-top roleplaying and pick-your-poison storytelling, a roll of the dice determines whether they’ll score a legendary win…or an epic fail.

Set in a classic high-fantasy setting, Seth is last-surviving apprentice of the great wizard Bristleboor. One day, Bristleboor sends Seth on a mission to find an elusive flower that grows in the tunnels under the castle they live in. Aided by an imprisoned imp named Calivore, Seth traverses the tunnels and comes upon monsters to fight and puzzles to solve while learning secrets about himself…and his master. By the end, he and the reader will need to make choices about where and with whom their loyalties lie and what kind of hero they want to become.

In this new adventure series from Nick Eliopulos, the reader becomes the character, getting to make their own choices about how the story will unfold. Or do they? Some chapters will give options while others will ask the reader to roll a six-sided die and let fate decide. It’s an interactive reading experience like no other that will allow young readers to tap into a Dungeon & Dragons style of storytelling and give them an early introduction to pick-your-poison storytelling and table-top roleplaying.

The Review

Friends, FRIENDS, please gather around and let me gush at you for moment. To all my fellow Millennial readers, you’re going to want to take a look at Roll for Danger: The Cursed Catacombs because it is going to fill you with the kind of nostalgia that even made me a bit teary eyed. Do you remember the “choose your own adventure” books? Where you would flip through, with your breath held, to see if you made the right choices and survived or made the wrong ones and were trapped forever in a dark abyss. Or, maybe (shhhh I won’t tell), you sometimes sneakily kept your finger on the last page just in case. This book is that, but even better.

Roll for Danger: The Cursed Catacombs is a mixture of a puzzle book, a “choose your own adventure” book and a light version of Dungeons & Dragons. We meet our protagonist, Seth, the last surviving apprentice of a great (and probably terrible it seems) wizard. The book gives you the option to either write inside of it on the provided stat sheet, or to print one online if you think you’ll want to play again. Then it walks you step by step through assigning your stats and getting you ready to set off on your adventure.

As you can see from my sheet above, it’s a pretty simplified version of character sheet with just enough stats to really make this book a fun read through. I also really loved that the author reassures the reader that it’s okay to assign a zero to one of the stats, because you can’t be good at everything. True in role playing games, true in life. Once you assign your stats, you’re ready to set off and start making decisions! As the book progresses it swaps between simple “a, b or c” decisions and then rolls on a D6 to determine whether you pass a check or two. Since I assigned a “0” to my cleverness slot, let me tell you that more than a few times I went in blind to an encounter, but it made things so much fun!

Throughout are also really clever puzzles that make this story that much more challenging. One of the main ones is a chess board that you must navigate across to escape the room. There’s an image of it on one of the entries, and then you slowly make your way across by choosing what square to move to next after passing a check on the last one. I found myself drawing it out on the back of my character sheet so I could more easily reference it, and make marks of the squares I’d successfully made it across the time before. I was immersed my friends.

For a lot of middle grade readers, which are the demographic that this book is really aimed at, this will likely be their first foray into an actual story that mirrors that video games that they are more used to playing. I can see reluctant readers specifically really excited to give this a shot, because it really does pull you in. The decisions you make matter. Your choices now will really impact what choices you have later on, and yet there’s not a looming level of stress at all. It’s just exciting to get lost and see what happens. Oh, and the illustrations are absolutely stellar. They add so much to this story.

I know, I know, I’m rambling now. The short version of this is that I highly recommend this book and upcoming books in this series! I played through this twice, and had an absolute blast both times. Seth and I made some good decisions, and some tragic ones, and yet on we progressed. This is is such a great series to introduce young readers to table top roleplaying games, and also just to give them something analog to do that will still fall within their interests. Trust me, and pick this up.