Designed by: Matthew Moore
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!
This would make a great after dinner-party game; no rules to explain, and no onus to be witty or inventive in your own right. In fact, the more obtuse you chosen volume (an encyclopedia of houseplants featured in one of our games, I think), the funnier the results can be. And you an play with any number of people - or at least, as many people as there are books in the house.
There's nothing combative here. although the scoring is completely arbitrary. For kids it's probably worth clarifying at the outset that this game really isn't about winning!
Everyone's involved at all times, so the only waiting is short periods when (if) you've got your answer and everyone else is still looking for theirs.
None. It's basically a game of one rule!
Bring Your Own Book is infinitely replayable considering it functions off the back of the millions of books, most of which have hundreds of pages and therefore a bazillion options.
3-8
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Bring Your Own Book is a party game where the pressure to be clever or hilarious to some degree is off you, as you're limited by the book you hold in your hand. It could be played where the most appropriate answer takes the card, but we've found that absurdity and silliness tends to win out. I don't think it's the best party game I've ever played, as there can be lulls and complaints that, say, there are no decent excuses for forgetting a birthday in Romeo and Juliet - but it's a game speckled with moments of hilarity all the same, and a great leveller for adults and kids to play together: despite the books being front and centre, there's nothing literary about it.