The people who put together these diagrams have a special place in my OCD heart!
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I think Tunnels & Trolls was the first system to publish a series of fantasy-themed gamebooks.
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Reminds me a bit of Nell reading her primer on the beach in Diamond Age.
Beautiful analogy!
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Was that the one from New Jersey?
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That looks like a really wild one. Which CYOA is it?
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I think it was this one, actually, now that I look.
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UFO 54-46 takes you to planet Jamaica
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Sounds like an important life lesson in the alternate future of GQP dominion. /s
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I learned in this thread how many similar books there were to Fighting Fantasy. All these other series that I never knew about!
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Dunno… just googled CYOA and clicked the ‘images’ tab 
Also, I can’t help but think ‘CYOA’ means ‘cover your own @ss’.
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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
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Ah, the dreams we used to have 
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ALSO: Scott Adams the game designer is a different person from Scott Adams the cartoonist
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Works great until you run across the one where the goblins slowly kill you, in gruesome detail, over 12 pages
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How could you not???
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