When Books Become Cartridges

A self-hosted, browser-based book console where your CYOA novels are the game.

I’ve been thinking about what it would look like if the “Give Yourself Goosebumps” series never stopped being a game. You’d pick up the book, flip to a page, make a choice, flip again — and the whole time it felt less like reading and more like playing. The book was the cartridge. You were the console.

That’s the idea behind Booksole.

What is it?

Booksole is a , single-file HTML app (for now)that turns choose-your-own-adventure books into playable games — complete with save slots, multiple playthroughs, auto-generated achievements, and an endings tracker.

You drop in a plain .txt copy of your book. The app parses it, maps out all the branching paths, counts the endings, and boots it up like a game cartridge being slotted into a console. No server. No sign-up. No subscription. Just a file in a browser.

The whole thing runs locally. Your books never leave your device.

The Inspiration

R.L. Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps series was my first experience with non-linear storytelling. You weren’t just reading — you were playing. Every “turn to page 52” was a decision with consequences. Some paths led to victory. Most led to something horrible. And the thrill was in finding all of them.

Modern games have achievements, save states, completion trackers. Why don’t books?

Stardance answers that question. It treats your book like a game ROM. It reads the branching structure, builds a graph of every page and decision, and wraps the whole thing in an interface that feels like a retro console — monospace font, dark terminal aesthetic, endings map, achievement popups.

Every book you upload gets its own automatically generated achievement list based on its structure: find your first ending, reach a good ending, discover all the bad endings, finish in three choices or fewer. The game figures out what’s achievable by analyzing the book itself at parse time.

v0.1 — What’s in it

Cartridge loading — drop a .txt file and the parser scans for page markers and “turn to page X” instructions, rebuilds the branching tree, and launches
Multiple save slots — run through the book multiple times simultaneously, each as a separate playthrough
Endings map — a dot grid showing every ending in the book, colored by type (good / bad / neutral), filling in as you discover them
Auto-generated achievements — built from graph analysis at load time, no hand-crafting needed
Achievement toasts — unlock notifications that feel like a game, not a reading app
Session stats choices made, pages visited, play throughs started, endings found Persistent saves everything lives in localStorage, survives page reloads the entire app is one .html file, no build step, no dependencies, no installing any software

If any one has any suggestions on any features to add or any technologies that could be incorporated to make the development or the user experience easier please do give feedback