Choice of Games - Interactive storytelling & choices

The decision is entirely up to you!

Choice of Games offers an impressive collection of over 100 interactive novels that span a variety of genres including action, adventure, drama, history, warfare, humor, the supernatural, and more. All our games are text-based—lacking graphics or sound effects—and they rely on the boundless energy of your imagination.

Every CoG game empowers you to build your own character, allowing you to decide their gender and sexual orientation. The path you take is determined by your choices, which influence the narrative.

Explore some beloved classics from Choice of Games:

• Affairs of the Court: Choice of Romance — Immerse yourself in court intrigue and alter the course of history, or engage in a romantic entanglement that could shake the kingdom!

• Choice of Broadsides — Take on the role of the greatest naval hero ever... yourself!

• Choice of the Deathless — Combat demons and undead lawyers, and secure souls to pay off your student debts!

• Choice of the Dragon — Transform into a fire-breathing dragon that hoards gold and captures princesses!

• Choice of Robots — The robots you create will have a significant impact on the world! Will you teach them love or seize control of Alaska with your robotic army?

• Choice of the Vampire — Embark on a 200-year journey filled with love, power, and redemption.

• Creatures Such as We — A thought-provoking romance featuring game developers on the moon. In this layered narrative, there has to be a better conclusion! 2nd place in IFComp, 2014.

• Crème de la Crème — Ascend to the pinnacle of your elite private school for socialites! Winner of XYZZY Best Game, 2019.

• Grand Academy for Future Villains — Planning global domination? Welcome to the premier villain training institution!

• Heart of the House — What sacrifices will you make when trapped in a cursed mansion? Will you eradicate the evil or harness its power? Can love flourish in a haunted environment?

• Heroes of Myth — You orchestrated a false prophecy and pretended to save the world. Now, it’s becoming a reality!

• The Luminous Underground — Exorcise spirits from a haunted subway! Nebula Award finalist for Best Game Writing, 2020.

• The Magician’s Workshop — Reveal the magical secrets of Renaissance Italy to uncover your master's murderer! Nebula Award finalist for Best Game Writing, 2019.

• Psy High — Which is more frightening: the principal, your psychic abilities, or finding a date for prom?

• Rent-a-Vice — What doesn’t kill you leads to someone else’s demise and spirals down a path of indulgence. Nebula Award finalist for Best Game Writing, 2018.

• Tally Ho — A comedic tale of manners during the Jazz Age—only the ideal servant can resolve a perfect predicament!

About Us

Choice of Games is the world’s largest publishing house for interactive novels. Our award-winning games are entirely text-based—hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Choose your path: your choices control the story.

Since 2010, we’ve published more than 150 interactive novels on Steam, web, and our “Choice of Games” app for iPhone and Android, including multiple nominees for the SFWA Nebula Award. We publish more than a dozen games a year, and we continue to expand our back catalog of older games, which we make available for free to all readers.

Using ChoiceScript, the scripting language we’ve created for developing interactive novels, an individual author can write a full-length branching narrative, hundreds of thousands of words long, all in a single voice, under one creative vision. A player might read around 20% of those words on one playthrough, ensuring that our games remain fresh each time you play.

Choice of Games is a feminist, egalitarian, sex-positive company. All CoG games allow you to choose your character’s gender and sexual orientation.

Why Multiple-Choice Games?

We have chosen to develop multiple-choice games for several reasons. First and foremost, we like to focus on interesting choices. Many games work by surrounding interesting choices with lots of tactical play or interactions with a set of game systems. That can be fun, but it means that relatively little of the playing experience is about making choices at a high-level. In contrast, by creating a game system that is all about multiple-choice interactions, we can focus on the choices we find interesting—moral choices, trade-offs between different values and characteristics, and so forth. When you play one of our games, you should be making meaningful choices all the time.

It’s worth stressing that last bit: games need meaningful choices to be interesting. If your choices are not meaningful, then you’re really just going through the motions. By structuring all game interactions as multiple-choice questions, we focus our attention as game designers on making sure that every choice that the player makes is meaningful. Of course, several different things can make a choice meaningful. In some cases, it determines the flow of the game from then on, even whether the protagonist lives or dies. In other cases, the choices are meaningful because they help the player explore and define who their character is. What makes your character tick can be among the most meaningful sorts of choices, even if it has no direct effect on the outcomes of the game. Other varieties of games can lose the meaningfulness of their choices by focusing the player’s attention on solving a puzzle of sorts: how do I best achieve a well-defined goal? Nothing wrong with that, but we prefer in our design to focus on something else.

Finally, multiple-choice structures enable us to both construct a meaningful story with narrative, character development, and so forth while also allowing the player meaningful control over the story’s development. A tension exists between allowing player choice and facilitating a satisfying story. Multiple-choice structures offer a potential way to bridge that problem. It restricts player options, but the pay-off for that is the opportunity to construct stories that work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q) Why isn’t there a “back” button on your games?

A) We’ve considered incorporating an Undo (or Back) button instead, but we found that users would spoil their game, by clicking on every option one at a time and clicking Back, until they found a result they liked the best. It removed all of the dramatic tension; one user described this as a “chore!”

It’s tempting to say “well, if it’s a chore, and it ruins the game, then why are you pushing the Back button so much? Just play the game without testing every option first!” But I think people just can’t help themselves; it’s just too hard to resist pressing the Back button when we’ve made the “wrong” choice. And even if we never use the Back button, it undermines tension just knowing that “if I ever get in trouble, I can always Undo…”

Q) When is Choice of the Dragon 2 (or another sequel) coming out?

A) We do not necessarily plan for all of our games to have sequels, and our older games are less likely to get them, but you can always check to see if a sequel has been announced on the forums.

Q) Why does it take so long for new games to come out?

A) Though it may not take all that long to play through a single game, because of their parallel structure, they consist of many more words than a novella of comparable length. Take Choice of the Dragon, for instance. It’s around 30k words (including code). Conventional definitions of a novel place their minimum word-count at 50k words. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of time and effort to write a novel (even just 3/5ths of one!).

Q) When you say, “There are 100,000 words in this game!”, does that include the code?

A) Yes, it does.

Q) I’ve paid for Intrigues, but nothing has downloaded!

A) If you can pay for it, it’s already been downloaded. Paying for it just unlocks the second part.

Q) I’ve played to the end of Romance, but there’s no Intrigues!

A) You have to be involved with the monarch in order to continue on to Intrigues. If you’re married to Mendoza, you live happily ever after, or some such.

Q) Is Dan Fabulich of Choice of Games the same Dan Fabulich that ported AlterEgo?

A) The very same. He was also a lead Cloudmaker.

Q) I have an e-Ink Kindle, but I don’t live in the United States. How can I get a copy of your games on my Kindle?

A) Unfortunately, Amazon has not expanded its Active Content outside of the US yet.

Q) I want to play your games in French/German/Spanish…

A) After some experiments we have found that translating our games is costly, and doesn’t earn enough to support the expense, so we unfortunately have had to shelve the idea of translating future games for the time being.

Q) Can I write a game using ChoiceScript? How do I do that?

A) Yes! You’d probably start by downloading the code from Github. Then you’d want to read our introductory tutorial. Once you’ve managed the basics, you can try the more advanced stuff. If you have questions, you should pose them to the Google group, and someone in the community will probably reply to you.

Q) Is there a ChoiceScript Wiki?

A) Not yet. We have discussed setting one up, but it would require time that we just don’t have right now. That said, several enterprising members of our community have put a lot of effort into the this ChoiceScript Wiki.

Q) Is there any size limit to a game that I write?

A) No. There is no limit to the number of words or scenes.

Q) Do I have to pay you a fee for the code?

A) As long as you don’t make any money off the code, you don’t have to pay us anything.

Q) Can I host a game on my own website?

A) Yes!

Q) What if there’s a “Donate” button on the webpage with the game?

A) That falls under the phrase “making money”.

Q) How can I publish my game on my own and make money? Can I release directly on the iOS App Store, for example?

A) Once your game is written, we will sign a commercial license with you. See the contract for details, but the gist is that you’ll be free to sell and distribute a game made with ChoiceScript anywhere you like in exchange for 25% of your gross proceeds.