Item - Stampede!

For those collecting the whole series, this is a fairly difficult book to find. But at least, if you can't find it, you aren't missing too much.

This feels only distantly like a CYOA book. There are very few choices - I think maybe 6 or 7. And one of them loops back into another path. It's incredibly linear.

The first choice is three branches, then each of those has another split. Each path leads to a distinct "story" event. Effectively, the story just plods along until you reach the last decision on a branch, then an event happens that makes it feel like an ending.

I know that's hard to understand.

The story is that you go visit your uncle, who runs a ranch. You can choose to help drive the cattle, work on breaking in a few horses, or go work on a rodeo.

Very few of the decisions feel like they matter. Most of them are broad decisions about "do you keep doing what you're doing, or do you decide to do something else."

There are two choices in the book that seem more legitimate, where your decision actually has some bearing on what happens. Usually, the decisions just exist to split the story, and have nothing to do with what happens afterward. This is best exemplified by one branch.

If you decide to stay in one place, and continue what you're doing, you go to sleep, and the barn catches fire that night. No explanation is given, no choices given about how to react to the fire. It just... happens.

Except for the completists, this one isn't worth your time. My wife was looking forward to something having to do with horses, and this seemed more annoying than anything else.

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