Bring Your Own Book

Bring Your Own Book is basically a deck of cards – to play the game you really do need to bring your own book – or books plural, as each player should have a book to themselves. Novels, factual, reference – it doesn’t hugely matter, although something as rigidly list-like as a dictionary or thesaurus should be avoided.

The game is simple – in each round a starting player picks a category (of sorts) off one of the cards, denoting what players are looking in their books for. It might be a newspaper headline, a line from an obituary, a name for a cat, or something Arnold Schwarzenegger might say. Everyone then starts riffling through their books for a suitable – or suitably absurd – answer. As soon as one player decides they have something, they flip a timer giving everyone else limited time to come up with an answer. When the timer runs out, everyone reads out their ‘answers’ from their books (those who found nothing appropriate read something randomly!) and the starting player chooses a winner, giving them the card as a point.

Any time a player earns their third card, all books are passed to the left. As soon as one player hits their fourth or fifth card (depending on player count) they win the game!