Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles – Last Block Standing

Nick Eliopulos's Last Block Standing is a Minecraft adventure for 7 year olds about five friends who find their favourite game has stopped working for them.

What happens

It's the sixth and last Woodsword Chronicles book, so the gang are already old hands. Morgan, Jodi, Ash, Harper and Po put on their VR headsets at school and their minds end up inside a world that looks and acts almost exactly like Minecraft.

Now the Evoker King has the Foundation Stone, and a strange shimmering wave rolls across the land. Afterwards nothing works. Axes bounce off trees. Diamond swords bounce off monsters. Nobody can eat, so nobody can heal. Even a waterfall is frozen in mid-air (which is very creepy in the rain).

There's a proper Minecraft fight early on, with lightning, a skeleton horse and three arrow-firing riders. The friends can't hurt them, so Jodi comes up with the plan. Why box yourselves in when you could box the bad guys in?

That's the bit your reader will love. The team has to think its way out of everything, because the usual tricks have stopped working. Anyone who knows the game will enjoy spotting the shulkers, the wither skulls and the End City tower.

But the real-world half is just as big. Ash's parents bake her a cake and then tell her the family is moving, because her mum's job needs her somewhere else. Ash has only just started to feel like she belongs.

Her friends take it very badly, and their rescue plans are brilliant. Convince her parents the house is haunted? Fake termites? Warn them the class hamster will sink into a deep depression? Po is quite hurt when nobody else fancies living with ghosts.

If you've got a child who's ever had a best friend move away, this will feel very familiar. Morgan's own story about a friend called Dante, who moved and never spoke to him again, lands quietly in the middle of all the action.

It's gentle about it too. Ash has an idea of her own about staying close, and it's a lovely one to share with a reader who worries about friends changing schools.

What to read next

If they'd rather be inside the game than reading about it, Tom Nicoll's Level Up is a good next step. Flo sneaks a go on her mum's unfinished invention and she and her friend Max land on the first level of her favourite space game, with lasers flying everywhere.