Bring Your Own Book

There is a game that I stumbled on for my library a while back that amuses me greatly. And it's this one: Bring Your Own Book.

A game about books?! Sold!

It seemed like a fun, engaging way to interact with my teens apart from a more traditional game. Plus I love that depending on what books people bring the game is always different. This game is very cost-effective for even libraries on a tight budget, but they also have a free-to-download version. Check them out here: https://www.bringyourownbook.com/.

I also checked ahead of time to make sure they are cool with me sharing the slide I've made with my fellow librarians and since we make nothing on this blog we are good to. The link to it is down below.

So once in-library programming became a thing, this was one game that I began to think about how it could be played in a virtual format.

Turns out it can. BookGeek2 and some of our BookGeekBuddies (and fellow librarians) helped do a play-test and work out some kinks. Then I got to do an even bigger play-test/demo with some fellow teen librarians across the country. And that was super-duper helpful

Seriously I love my fellow librarians.

With more ideas for gameplay options I tweaked my slides so they could be usable in a variety of ways.

Essentially how it works is this:

Patrons will bring with them 2-3 books.

You will pre-select some of the prompt slides.

Here's the steps for play:

1. The prompt is read.
2. Everyone looks through their first book for something to answer that prompt.
3. Once the first person finds their answer they say I've got it and the 1 minute timer begins.
4. Everyone else has that 1 minute to find their answer and if they do not once time is called they must then just open their book to a random page and read a random sentence.
5. Winner is determined and awarded 1 point.
6. When someone hits 3 points (or increments of 3), then everyone swaps books. {Sometimes we would simply make this optional.}

That's it really for the general rules. but there are many different ways you can play it depending upon what works for you. Hence, the diversity of the slides.

The answer slides/bullet points

• Use this if you want to do democratic voting. Typically, you will have one judge who reads the prompt and picks the winner (think Cards Against Humanity). But if you want everyone to answer and then vote collectively on a winner having this does help. Honestly, it helps quite a bit for even a single judge, especially in large groups. It's a lot to try to remember.
• With this slide you cannot be in presentation mode because you will have to exit out each time you want to time--ugh! TIP: With Zoom you can screen share a portion of your screen (drop-down box) and just select the portion of the slide that you want visible. That will help not have all that extra stuff around the edges. And keeps the focus off of others seeing the next prompt before it is time.
• If you want anonymity with voting just set up chat to only come to you.
  

Timer Slide

• If you are doing the answer slide you cannot do this. It is a YouTube link that will only autoplay in present mode.
• If you are not using it, just set up your phone timer. If you have your mic on people will still hear and you can just call time.

That's pretty much it. This can be played with friends, your staff for a morale boost, teens, adults, book clubs for an icebreaker, etc. There is a lot of potential.

Here's the slides. It's set up so you can copy it to your drive and edit it from there. Because trust me this is also a great game to have people give you new prompts to add to your collection.