The people who put together these diagrams have a special place in my OCD heart!
I think Tunnels & Trolls was the first system to publish a series of fantasy-themed gamebooks.
Reminds me a bit of Nell reading her primer on the beach in Diamond Age.
Beautiful analogy!
Was that the one from New Jersey?
I was just trying to remember which book that was! Your clue helped me find it.
That looks like a really wild one. Which CYOA is it?
I think it was this one, actually, now that I look.
Sounds like an important life lesson in the alternate future of GQP dominion. /s
I had (& still have) 4 of these. This one happens to be nearby:
Speaking of D&D, there were also single-player modules that had a little red, but transparent, viewer for decoding the module one step at a time. I racked up a whole lot of XP that way, because whenever I encountered a wandering monster, I forgot to roll the die to see whether I’d actually encountered it & just assumed I was supposed to confront it.
When I read these as a kid I would choose by counting the number of pages for each choice before another decision - go to the longer one.
The article in the New Yorker is really good and is written in a ‘choose your next step’ format which on its face sounds like a little much but works out really nicely.
Oohhhhh - so I just assumed it was the same Steve Jackson by Steve Jackson Games. TIL.
So Space Assassin was also by British Steve Jackson.
Right, I didn’t mean to say Fighting Fantasy was by D&D. Just that D&D had their own line of CYOA type books, and one where you roll dice to fight. I guess they were called Adventure Gamebooks.
I had this one.
That is clever!
Yeah the above books I posted, Space Assassin and Starship Traveler both had a character sheet to keep track of your stats. The Soulforge one had a bookmark that doubled as your character sheet!
Very! As a kid who most desperately wanted to play D&D and had no one to play with, this was the next best thing.
I have one of those that I got in a lot, but never tried it out. I should! I WISH I had one of those as a kid. I resorted to making my own dungeon and then crawling through it.
I learned in this thread how many similar books there were to Fighting Fantasy. All these other series that I never knew about!
Dunno… just googled CYOA and clicked the ‘images’ tab
Also, I can’t help but think ‘CYOA’ means ‘cover your own @ss’.
It looks like it was written by someone else (Andrew Chapman), who wasn’t credited on the cover.
The books with Steve Jackson Games connections are
Ah, the dreams we used to have
ALSO: Scott Adams the game designer is a different person from Scott Adams the cartoonist
Works great until you run across the one where the goblins slowly kill you, in gruesome detail, over 12 pages
How could you not???