The Golden Voyage

Even for a Scott Adams game, unwarned deathtraps and unwinnable states crop up almost everywhere in this game. Most new players will die within a few moves by picking up an item and having their throat slit by a jealous merchant (with no indication that the item even belonged to the merchant.) Still it has some fun to it - Adams' trick of making the familiarity of the setting and the sparsity of the prose work together - and a nice early example of a pilotable vehicle, the sailing ship.