Recently discovered the existence of Stake Your Destiny, a run of four Buffy Choose Your Own Adventure style gamebooks (fewer longer sections than the Fighting Fantasy style and no game system) from 2005.
I mail-ordered the first for 40p plus postage and, okay, breezed through it in twenty minutes, flipping back twice to avoid sudden death endings. The most interesting part is that there are two basically good endings, and at least one sort-of-okay one, as well as the traditional bunch of bad ones. The bad ones take up a lot more page count than I feel they should, some going to two or three pages, because really, who reads those? Especially since the first is by far the shortest - 160 pages versus two at 256 and the final double it at 320.
They’re set in The High School Years, specifically the first half of Season Two, for the classic “High School Is Hell, but Buffy has friends to help deal with it” setup. Basically the same place the BOOM! reboot comics seems to be setting up shop, complete with Spike and Dru being around instead of the Master.
The plots are perfectly viable episode / adventure setups, though I doubt the first one would get past Standards And Practices. The second is probably the best, Nancy Holder did a lot of consistent work in Buffy book land starting with the very first novel after the adaptation of Welcome To The Hellmouth. Though it also doesn’t have many actual branching decisions.
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