Charts of Endless Quest vs Fighting Fantasy

After writing my last post about using automation for gamebook testing I decided to try it on the Endless Quest books as I rather like them. They were written for a slightly younger audience than the Fighting Fantasy ones and have a different complexity level, being more like books with choices than games with some text.

Being quite thin paperbacks and given that many entries covered several pages, whereas the Fighting Fantasy often had the opposite of many entries per page, I was expecting far less branching choices but was still somewhat surprised at the result as I also ran the Fighting Fantasy Citadel of Chaos book through for comparison.

In the images below the game starts at the top and proceeds through to the green square to win, the red squares to lose, and the occasional grey dead-end for an almost-win (Endless Quest often allowed the player to partially complete the quest).

The result is obvious visually and makes clear the difference between FF with many, many branches of small text entries and EQ with its far less varied but much more wordy multi-page entries. Personally I prefer the EQ style despite the lower target age of the writing, but take a look ...