November 20, 2017
Bring Your Own Book
If it’s November, it’s time for Will Shortz’s Wonderful World of Words at the beautiful Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York. And as we do every year, word fanatics from all over the country played four board games, three of them brand new.
Bring Your Own Book is two years old, but deserves to be better known. The mechanics of the game couldn’t be simpler, and will be familiar to anyone who has played Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity.. Enclosed cards give you prompts (e.g., “We’d all be in trouble if this were true,” “A universal truth,” “A line from a horoscope”), and you find the answers to these prompts from within the contents of books that you and your fellow players have brought to the table. Your job is to come up with a word, phrase, or sentence in your book that will please one player, the judge (called “The Picker”). You can try to find a serious answer or find something you think The Picker will find funny.
We’ve played this game with a romance novel, a Mediterranean cookbook, a thriller, the Bible, an anatomical dictionary, a graphic novel, a children’s picture book, a guide to fantasy sports, a diet book, and a poetry book, among others, and it is surprisingly easy and amusing to find appropriate answers, even in the most unlikely places. It’s particularly fun to rotate the books, so that everyone has a chance to mine each publication (yes, you can even play with magazines and/or newspapers, as well as books).
The gameplay is so simple and seamless that you’ll be playing within minutes of opening the box. Bring Your Own Book is appropriate party game for the whole family and for all ages (you can regulate any potential “adult” material by which books you choose to play with). Bring Your Own Book plays well with 4 players but add a few more and it’s even more fun. Word lovers are book lovers. What could be more fun than going on a scavenger hunt in books?
BYOB is brought to you by Gamewright. Amazon is currently selling it for $11.99, and sometimes even less.