In the Sagard books you play of the role of, you guessed it, Sagard, a young barbarian warrior. You are from the land of Ratik, and you hail from the Northern part, which is mostly frozen wasteland. The first book has you undertake your quest of manhood, and other books send you on further adventures.
The Sagard books use the Hero's Challenge rules (I know of no other series that does). There are experience levels to all characters in the game (you start at Level 2) and the experience of you and your opponents plays a large part in combat. Combat is resolved with either a D4 or by flipping through pages in the book to determine a random number. Then you compare the number to the Fighting-Level Table to determine the number of wounds you inflict on your opponent. Repeat the process for your opponents and you've got the combat system.
The combat system has its good and bad parts. First, it is flexible enough to handle multiple combatants without needing special rules or approximations to handle it like most other gamebook systems. However, you will roll a lot of dice (or flip a lot of pages) to conclude an encounter, even more than in Fighting Fantasy. This takes too much time and gets old after a while.
The fact that the system uses levels rather than a "combat skill" means that you always start the game evenly, because Sagard is always Level 2. Oh, he always starts with 20 hit points, too. I find this acceptable. Additionally, for every opponent you defeat you gain experience marks. Collect enough and you progress to the next level, making you better in combat. This is a great idea, one that I would like to see used more.
Sagard the Barbarian 1, 1985, Gary Gygax and Flint Dille
This gamebooks is set up really different. This is both good and bad, but mostly good. The book begins with you ready to begin your Ordeal of Courage, a rite of passage where you go off and do manly things (normally involving killing lots of things) to earn the respect of the warriors of your tribe. So you set off into the frozen wilderness to do something impressive. Along the way you get convinced to go after the lair of the Ice Dragon to slay the ferocious beast.
This book does a number of things right, but it also does some things wrong. The story is fairly strong, and the writing is definitely from the barbarian perspective, with a number of sections making derogatory comments about "soft, civilized" people. The best thing deals with the whole Ordeal of Courage story idea. During gameplay you are trying to collect trophies to take back to the tribe. These are worth points, and at the end you total up your points to see if you are successful. This is cool, as you have to make decisions about what actions to take based on their relative worth as valiant deeds. Also, the way the book deals with the Ice Golem is cool. You'll understand when you read the book. Gygax's experience comes through in a number of areas like this and strengthens the book.
However, that isn't enough to save this book from a three-star rating. There are some problems with the book, too. First, it's too short. Only 120 sections? Come on, guys. Give me a little more story for my money. Second, the book is too easy. I beat the book on my second try. Granted, I got a little lucky with the Ice Golem, but the combats are really too easy. In the early part of the book you can't die if you lose a combat. I'm not sure why this was done, but I don't like it. Also, early on you get a very cool weapon. This makes you tougher than just about anything you meet in the game. There isn't any sense of challenge to it all; you just roll dice or flip pages for minutes at a time until you win. Then, you almost always get back a large number of hit points after each combat. The easy combats mixed with the small number of sections makes this book a breeze to win, if you have any sense. I like more challenge.
So a moderate three-stars for The Ice Dragon. The system has some good points, but the execution of it wasn't up to par. There are better books out there.