Game of Captives (Part 1 - Overview)
Hello, all. I hope your week is going well. Thank you for joining me as we return to the world of Fire and Fang for the third book, Game of Captives.
My feelings about this series continue to be mixed. I believe that, it most respects, Game of Captives is a massive improvement over its predecessor. Lindsay Buroker wrote a fast-paced roller coaster of a narrative where the consequences of characters’ decisions compound upon one another, leading to some moments that had a lot of potential. At the same time, the way this story is written actively works against its objectives. The result was a book that I personally found quite frustrating outside of a few bright spots.
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check our my reviews for the previous books, Sky Shielder and Red Dragon. You can also read more about Buroker’s work in the recently concluded review series for Magnetic Magic. If you’re all caught up (or don’t care about that), let’s fly.
STATS
Title: Game of Captives
Series: Fire and Fang (Book 3)
Author(s): Lindsay Buroker
Genre: Fantasy (Romantasy)
First Printing: February 2026
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers for Game of Captives will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
Heavy, unmarked spoilers for the previous two books in the series, Sky Shielder and Red Dragon, will be provided throughout this review. I’m also going to assume that you’ve already read the reviews for those books, though it isn’t necessary to do so to understand this review.
STRUCTURE
This review is going to have five parts, which will be releasing on Wednesdays. I need to skip a week to accommodate the “Perihelion” review, but after that, it will be pretty smooth sailing.
Part 1 (Today)
Premise
Rating
Content Warning
Genre
Series
Part 2 (April 8th)
Plot
Part 3 (April 15th)
Character
Part 4 (April 22nd)
Worldbuilding
Romance
Part 5 (April 29th)
Prose
Tone
PREMISE
From the Amazon product page, we get:
Falling in love with the enemy is never a good idea, especially when you’re in the middle of a war.
After her coronation, Queen Syla Moonmark must lead her people against the stormers and their dragon allies to drive them out of the kingdom. That would be easier if she’d managed to bring home the rare magical components that would allow the rebuilding of the sky shielder that was sabotaged early in the war. Without that protection, keeping dragons away from her people’s islands is impossible.
As she battles the kingdom’s enemies, worries about usurpers, and learns what it means to be bonded to the persnickety red dragon, Wreylith, Syla plans to capture and interrogate the dragon rider, Captain Vorik. By questioning him, she might learn where the crucial shielder components are—and how to get them.
The problem is that Vorik is charming, handsome, talented, and keeps saving her life. She might even be falling in love with him.
To make matters worse, Vorik has orders to capture Syla.
If she can’t outmaneuver him, she could end up in an enemy camp, being tortured and interrogated for secrets with the power to destroy her entire kingdom.
Reaction
This premise describe the plot in a nutshell. After a book of attempting to seduce one another and another of competing for a single objective, Syla and Vorik are now directly trying to steal secrets from one another. While not everything within this story is set in motion by their back-and-forth, it does significantly impact events in the middle of the story and provide the setup for the climax.
RATING: 5/10
In most respects, Game of Captives is a significant improvement on Red Dragon.
The plot no longer feels like it is on autopilot; if anything, it is now a roller coaster driven by Syla and Vorik’s competing objectives. Buroker made patches to the geopolitical landscape that resulting in the characters’ decisions feeling much more logical. As for the Romance, while I do have issues with how Buroker chose to advance it, the fact remains that both Syla and Vorik end up making decisions based upon their feelings that have a significant impact of the narrative.
I would very much like to rate this book higher than its predecessor. The problem is that there is one outstanding issue that was not corrected. If anything, it has gotten worse.
That issue, of course, is the tone.
This story insists to its audience that we shouldn’t take it seriously. It seems like not a single conversation can occur without being stalled by quippy banter, and that banter is effectively the same two or three jokes recycled ad nauseum. Buroker is beating us over the head with this forced comedy. This is a big problem because, even more than its predecessor, key aspects of this book only work if the audience is taking the book seriously. The existential conflict is still in place. Perhaps even worse, though, is the fact that important character beats for Vorik and Syla only really work if the narrative is taken seriously, because they needed buildup. By making things so lighthearted, Buroker make these potentially powerful moments very limp.
As indicated above, I am going to save this breakdown of the damage to the tone for the final part of this review series. Just keep it in the back of your mind as we move forward.
CONTENT WARNING
Probably the most frustrating part of this particular review is that all the stuff I normally need to only mention in passing in the content warning actually has some rather significant narrative problems tied to it, meaning I need to discuss all of it in detail across the review. Sort of makes this section redundant. Still, I’m going to lay the cards on the table up front, so that those of you who screen books based on such things will know what you’re in for.
Pornography
We actually get three scenes of pornography in this one. There are full sex scenes in Chapters 9 and 29. There’s also a foreplay scene in Chapter 18 that gets interrupted.
Now, you all know that I really don’t care for pages upon pages of graphic sex, but there’s something about the scenes in this book that I find particularly irksome, something I noticed in Red Dragon but really came into focus here. This sex scenes feel like Buroker is crowbarring them in out of a sense of obligation. Granted, that feels less gross than a sex scene that exposes what the author masturbates too, but it is nonetheless frustrating. Much like the action scenes in A Master of Djinn, these scenes feel illogical, bolted on, as if the author added them in based on a template with no regard for if they actually provided any benefit to the story.
What makes this especially frustrating is that the second of the full sex scenes, in Chapter 29, is framed as this moment where Vorik and Syla finally let their guards down and embrace their love for each other. And that could have worked. We didn’t need multiple pages of pornography to achieve that goal, but the objective reality of them having sex as a consequence of this lowering of their guards would have have had narrative punch. The problem is, after one multi-page sex scene that makes Syla look like an idiot for putting sex over her objective, plus a foreplay scene that shows Vorik is easily aroused and manipulated, another scene of them having sex doesn’t mean much. Them not having sex would honestly have more emotional punch at this point.
All the Sex Talk
A lot of the quippy banter is focused on various sexual activities. It is very weird and off-putting. The fact many of these conversations happen between Syla / Vorik and their respective dragons makes this especially weird. Imagine if some dog walked up to you and began giving a detailed critique of your sex life.
On a related note, there is scene that comes to a screeching halt to discuss abortion drugs. I have more to say about this particular scene down the line. I’m bringing it up here because it is incredibly uncomfortable to have a scene that’s about a completely different topic slam into a wall while Syla and her cousin agree how they’d totally be happy to be mothers someday, but today, they’re happy to be getting their periods.
And there are other, smaller moments like this: periods brought up in banter, Syla discussing her birth control with her bodyguard, etc. These don't feel like natural or narratively relevant conversations. In fact, at one point in Chapter 3, we are explicitly told that these aren't topics to casually discuss outside of specific groups of people. It always feels like needless oversharing, and that made it very off-putting, rather than being witty or even just informative. How is it that Buroker managed to cover similar ground in Magnetic Magic without it feeling awkward, yet here, it is just so painful to read?
Violence and Gore
A LOT of people die in this book. Some of them die quite graphically, especially near the end of the book. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think it’s terrible, but is it an escalation from the previous book. You may not enjoy it if you have no stomach for gory imagery.
GENRE
Once more, this book is a clear-cut Romantasy. Both Syla and Vorik make pivotal decisions that impact the flow of the narrative on the basis of their attraction for one another. Certain emotional beats only have weight because of the context provided by their relationship. I don’t feel like it’s an exaggeration to say that the only reason this Fantasy plot is such a wild ride is because there is a Romance that keeps dragging the characters away from the easy solutions to their problems. In other words, the Romance elements in this book does what I thought the Violet-Xaden relationship subplot in Onyx Storm was going to do.
SERIES
On February 24th, Buroker shared on Twitter that the last Fire and Fang book is scheduled for release sometime in early April. It will probably be out before we finish this review series. In a separate Tweet on February 26th, she shared the title, Clutch and Claw. In a third Tweet, Buroker indicated this this book would be the “final (at least in the main series) Fine and Fang novel” (and also indicated that her next project will be Cozy Fantasy).
I think that Game of Captives works quite well as a third entry in a quartet. Buroker continues to build up momentum in the story. Certain plot threads are closed off, while others are clearly being prepared for a big finale (more on this when we discuss the plot). Overall, I’m a lot more optimistic going into Clutch and Claw than I was going into Triumph of the Wolf.
RIDING THE ROLLER COASTER
The plot of Game of Captives is a breath of fresh air after the autopilot fetch quest in Game of Captives. This is a story were one event cascades into the next and consequences feel meaningful. While not everything that gets set up gets some sort of payoff, the narrative as a whole is quite strong.
We’ll get into it in two weeks, on Wednesday, April 8th. Until then, thanks for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
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