We’re proud to announce that Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.
It’s 33% off until October 3rd!
Quench the thirst of 1920s Prohibition New York! Build a criminal organization to distill and peddle whiskey, and you could end up rich, famous, or dead.
Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire is an interactive historical novel by Drew Morrison. It’s entirely text-based, 210,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
The year is 1920. Prohibition has begun, and alcohol has become illegal overnight. As public bars, distilleries, and distributors have shut down, thirsty patrons now turn to the black market, as organized crime rises to meet insatiable demand.
You started running whiskey in rural Pennsylvania with a few friends in a barn, trying to make a better life for you and your sister, brewing bathtub gin and white lightning. Now, you’re building an illegal operation to distill and distribute liquor.
Your target: New York City. The teetotalers call it “Satan’s Seat.” The city is full of rich folks who want to drink booze while they dance the Charleston till dawn—and you’re going to sell it to them.
Use your business acumen and instincts to outwit your rivals; or ally with them to build your own empire even higher! Bargain with union leaders and mob bosses to get your booze to Manhattan’s ever-growing network of speakeasies—or ruthlessly eliminate every one of your rivals in bloodthirsty shootouts. Life back home in Pennsylvania is almost as dangerous, with the preacher who wants to keep your hometown dry, and the Feds moving in closer every day.
As you gather your power, there’s no telling how high you could climb. Will you become the mayor of your hometown? You won’t have to worry about the cops if they’re on your payroll. Will you just get rich, living in your palatial Manhattan penthouse? Or will you become a Broadway star with your name in lights?
But you know what they say: the higher they rise, the harder they fall. If you get on the wrong side of the wrong people, you could end up in prison, or worse.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Manage the workers in your operation; will you be a generous leader, or a merciless profiteer?
• Drive on wild car chases to get your moonshine to the big city before your rivals can catch you!
• Launder your illegal earnings through a Broadway play—and maybe even become the star!
• Navigate the politics in your hometown: Communists, union organizers, temperance preachers, and more—or become the mayor and put them all at your command.
• Climb the ranks of New York City’s mob to inherit an empire—or get caught by the Feds, and see it all come crashing down.
Why be a cog in someone else’s machine, when you can have your own moonshine empire?
We hope you enjoy playing Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
Quench the thirst of 1920s Prohibition New York! Build a criminal organization to distill and peddle whiskey, and you could end up rich, famous, or dead.
Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire is an interactive historical novel by Drew Morrison. It’s entirely text-based, 210,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Fields of Asphodel is a 1.3 million-word interactive novel by JJ Laurier. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Forced into an arranged marriage with the God of the Dead, only you can decide what to make of your new life. Befriend misfit deities, repel giant attacks, find the culprit behind the river goddess’s mysterious illness, and use your powers to nudge Fate in your favor! Decide what kind of deity you want to be—whether you’ll answer prayers, how you’ll develop your powers, and what role you’ll take in governance.
Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.
Play as neurodivergent or neurotypical.
Take on the powers of spring and life.
Find love and friendship among the gods of the ancient Greek Underworld.
Develop your abilities and hobbies, and choose the kind of life you want to live.
Grow a garden in the Underworld.
Defend the realm, advise the King, and solve a mystery.
Make a new home, or seize the opportunity to return to your old one.
Can you bring light to the darkest of realms?
JJ developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.
Dragon of Steelthorne by Vance Chance has been updated with two new chapters—30,000 words of new content. This update is free for all customers who have already purchased the game. For those who haven’t:
Rule a mighty city, fight battles, and embark on quests in a steampunk-fantasy land. As the Ardent or Ardessa of Lake Steelthorne, find love, power and a secret which could change the world.
Dragon of Steelthorne is a 170,000-word interactive novel by Vance Chance, weaving together story, city management and combat in a unique take on choice-based Interactive Fiction. Customize the level of challenge with four difficulty settings. It’s entirely text-based—without animation or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Now with two new chapters! Join your companions on more misadventures at the Great Carnival. Enjoy a night of dancing with them at the Windrose Ball.
• Play as male or female, straight or gay. • Explore a story set in a world with steampunk and fantasy elements. • Find romance from one of five possible love interests. Enjoy a romantic night with them at the Eternal Festival. • Choose from one of five classes, with different effects on story, city management and combat. • Manage a city and train soldiers to fight for you on missions. • Enjoy a three-slot save system which provides the flexibility to try different options without losing progress or having to start over.
Decide the future of your mighty city as its leader and ruler.
These discounts are available on all platforms and on choiceofgames.com until August 29th. We hope you enjoy playing our management games, andwe encourage you to tell your friends about it and to recommend Choice of Games on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites.
We’re proud to announce that The Ghost and the Golem, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.
Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, peasants, bandits, anarchists, and demons!
It’s 40% off until August 15th!
The Ghost and the Golem is an interactive historical fantasy novel by Benjamin Rosenbaum. It’s entirely text-based, 450,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
The year is 1881. Life in your village on the border of Poland and Ukraine is sweet as raisin pastries and bitter as horseradish. Matchmakers arrange marriages and klezmer musicians play at the weddings; friends reconcile after feuds and gossip about their neighbors; people pray in the little synagogue and study holy texts. But it is a tense time in the Russian empire, with antisemitic riots spreading across the land.
And inside your pocket is a magic amulet, revealing visions of the future, omens of your village in flames. When you hold it, you can see the blood and the bodies, smell the gunshots, and hear the marching songs. (Is that Russian? Or Ukrainian? You hear shouting in Polish.)
How could this future come to pass, and how will you stop it?
You’ll need allies. Can you sway the local Christian peasants or the Czarist garrison to protect your village from harm? What about the bandits and anarchists lurking in the wild forest? When a demonic sheyd offers you a bargain, what will you do to save the ones you love?
Or, there may be another answer. One of your closest friends has built a golem, a hulking clay creature stronger than a dozen soldiers, waiting to be animated with a forbidden power, a secret name. Will you breathe life into the golem? If you do, will it help to defend your village, or help to destroy it?
Or perhaps the amulet’s previous owner can help you. He was exiled from the academy for studying forbidden texts—for delving into mysteries he was far too young and unstable to understand, and now he’s missing. Can you find him? Can you harness the powers he unleashed? Does he know a secret name?
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; intersex or not; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Accept an arranged marriage and make your Mamma happy—and maybe yourself, too! Or find love on your own terms with a childhood friend or an anarchist musician.
• Delve into the secrets of the Unseen World to tangle with ghosts, dybbuks, prophetic visions, and a golem—or even ascend to a mystical plane to discover the greatest secrets of the universe!
• Hold fast to the traditions of your people’s past, or chase modern new ideas.
• Pursue your love of music and get a standing ovation onstage—or be pelted with potatoes as you fail miserably.
• Stand up to antisemitic agitators, angry peasants, Czarist soldiers, and hostile bandits to defend your village—or face defeat and flee in the wake of violence.
• Succumb to demonic influence, fend it off with faith or Enlightenment skepticism, or help those spirits find their path to the gates of repentance.
Can you find peace for your people—and your heart?
We hope you enjoy playing The Ghost and the Golem. We encourage you to tell your friends about it and to recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
The Bread Must Rise. In this magical baking contest, you’ll team up with the Queen Undying to bake your rivals into an early grave—or out of the grave, with necromancy!
Diabolical. As a criminal mastermind, choose a lair, rob a bank, hire a minion, and steal the world’s largest ball of aluminum foil! (Or, destroy the world. FINE.)
Grand Academy for Future Villains. Taking over the world? Welcome to the world’s finest preparatory school for villains, where unimaginable evil begins with a world-class education!
Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. Seize your destiny and vanquish your rivals at the world’s finest evil preparatory school! The whole gang is back for a deliciously meta sequel.
Neighbourhood Necromancer. Command the undead to take revenge on the suburbs! Everyone at school laughed at you, but no one will laugh when your minions seize control of the town.
Top Villain: Total Domination. Today, smash your heroic nemesis! Tomorrow, build a doomsday device to take over the world! But, wait, are your henchpeople going on strike?!
These discounts are only available on choiceofgames.com, and only until August 1st. We hope you enjoy playing our comedic villainy games, and we encourage you to tell your friends about them and to recommend them on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites.
Quench the thirst of 1920s Prohibition New York! Build a criminal organization to distill and peddle whiskey, and you could end up rich, famous, or dead.
Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire is an interactive historical novel by Drew Morrison. It’s entirely text-based, 150,000 words and hundreds of choices. Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with Drew to talk about Prohibition, ChoiceScript, and his writing process. Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire will be available on Thursday, August 22nd. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of its release—it really helps!
I think this is your first time writing interactive fiction, but you’re rather an accomplished playwright, I gather. Tell me a little about your background and what brought you to Choice of Games.
I started writing for theater in middle school, and got my Masters in Playwriting at the University of New Mexico. Dialogue has always been my favorite part of writing, and theater offers such a great way to get together with friends and tell a story. I worked for a devised theater company in Albuquerque for about five years, and I really got attached to the camaraderie that develops around putting up a play, especially when it’s done without a lot of financial resources. It means everybody learns different tasks, and shifts around with each show: sometimes you’re a writer, sometimes an actor, director, technician, or shadow-puppeteer. The whole thing ends up being this wonderful process of collaborative problem solving: How do we make what we want to make with what we have? Those limitations spark more interesting ideas than the ones you’d have if you could just pay problems away.
I was introduced to Choice of Games by a friend who had worked for the company as a cover artist. I’d never written anything like this before, and it was a steep learning curve, but the Choice of Games forum and community is such a vibrant scene of supportive people that it’s been really exciting to work on. As a writer, it’s so easy to get sucked into the lonely process of submitting to distant strangers and contests, rarely getting any feedback on your work. The opportunity to have people engaged and willing to respond to your drafts is an invaluable resource, which was my favorite part of working in theater.
What did you find most challenging about the game design and using ChoiceScript to craft a narrative?
Pretty much everything? I was so proud the day I finally submitted a full draft that you could play through from beginning to end that it’s fueled me through the whole editing process since. Having finished a CoG game now, it’s amazing how many tips and tricks you pick up along the way that would change how you approach writing another game.
There were a lot of really fun challenges purely at the level of the prose. For one, second-person/present tense is such a fun, propulsive voice to write in. As someone who didn’t grow up with tabletop roleplaying games, it’s a relatively new voice for me.
Also, as a playwright, my plays are often structured around reveals and buried secrets. When lights come up on a play, we don’t know the people on stage, and revelations about their pasts, motives, relationships, and shared histories are part of what fuels the drama.
In an interactive fiction novel, the reveal isn’t as useful, because it will only work for the first playthrough. This completely changes the notion of suspense as a storytelling technique–a returning player has already seen behind the curtain. Plus, in the main character’s case, the player needs to know (and decide) all major backstory decisions from the outset, so that they can make informed decisions. This was really fun for me; as a writer I couldn’t rely on old tricks. It feels like I usually write as someone watching from the audience, and this was like going on stage and whispering in the main character’s ear.
Bootlegger is set during such an interesting period in American history. What about the period, and about Prohibition in general do you think modern readers may not know about?
The intersection of coffee and alcohol is really interesting to me. Part of the reason people drank so much pre-Prohibition was because alcohol was one of the only reliably safe ways to drink water. It would be much lower alcohol content than we associate with booze today, but people would drink the entire day. Coffee and tea were new forms of safe ways to drink water, so people went from being mildly drunk all the time to sober and caffeinated. The intellectual and political ramifications of that are massive.
The period is great for anecdotes, and I love all the methods people came up with to get away with drinking. Speakeasies would install levers that, when pulled in the case of a raid, would dump their entire liquor display down a hidden chute, shattering the bottles and draining the booze. Alcohol had been determined to have no health benefits, but during Prohibition that suddenly changed: whiskey could be gotten legally with a prescription for all sorts of maladies.
For me, it’s also a really interesting time of how people respond to a ban. For many, Prohibition was an attempt to stop some truly devastating habits, such as poor workers and farmers blowing their full paychecks on the way home, before even getting to their families. You can see how the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League could see alcohol and the people who sold it as criminal enterprises. At the same time, the complete ban on it meant that many people saw a market, and exploited it ruthlessly. With Bootlegger, I wanted to explore the sudden emergence of a new market that’s illegal, lucrative, and slightly absurd; something that was legal a few short years ago is now a violent, thriving industry.
Do you have a favorite NPC, one you enjoyed writing most?
I’ve never written any kind of gangster story, so writing Capaldi was a lot of fun. Writing a villain in general is a lot of fun, actually, but especially in this case, since Capaldi can be a villain or an ally depending on the play-through. That type of character, alternately frightening and endearing, is so rich and prevalent in gangster movies, and I like that in interactive fiction you might only see someone’s worst side when you’re on their worst side, which is just a terrible place to be. I think one reason we get into stories like The Godfather is because we see two sides of people, while the other characters in the story only see one: loving family member, terrifying murderer. It seems impossible that they can be one person.
If you were transported to the world of Bootlegger, what kind of underground shenanigans would you be best at? Distilling, smuggling, or imbibing?
I think I’d be good at distilling. I know I’d be terrible at being in charge of an operation, I have neither the economic wherewithal or ruthlessness. But I was a barista for a long time, so I think I’d be good at tending a still. I don’t think Prohibition had much of a “craft rotgut” scene, but I imagine I’d be able to get to the point of describing the flavor notes to my customers, which could maybe help me work my way up to get the kind of clients who could afford to care about the quality of their whiskey during Prohibition. But I’m also too trusting, so I’d be very easy to rip off. So, if I could find my way into an operation run by someone like Sam in Bootlegger, who takes care of their own, I’d make a very good worker.
Do you have a favorite tipple or are you a teetotaler?
I do love the occasional bourbon or an old fashioned, but generally I stick with beer.
What else are you working on/working on next, writing-wise?
I’m currently getting my Masters in Political Science, so I’m writing several essays, mainly focusing on the global impact of the film industry. I recently had a staged reading of a new play, Wildlife, which focuses on the illegal wildlife trade, as part of an ongoing project for my classes focusing on climate change. I am also working on an audio drama, called Ambrosia’s Big Break, with the hopes of releasing it in podcast format. Over the process of revising Bootlegger, I’ve had more ideas about things I’d like to do in this medium, so I’ve started to sketch out ideas for another interactive novel. This one would take an interconnected series of science fiction stories I wrote, and adapt them into one big world for the player. It’s one of those narratives that I’ve been attached to for years, but haven’t found the proper form for yet.
We’re proud to announce that Bootlegger: Moonshine Empire, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.
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