Welcome back to Book Break! This video is going to be all about games. If you have followed me on the
internet for a while you will know that the only thing I love even half as much as books is games:
board games, word games, card games, dinner party games, all manner of games, but particularly if
they're related to books. So if you have an event coming up, if you've got a group of book-loving
friends you want to play a game with, settle in, make some notes, I'm going to talk you through
my favorite bookish party games. First up is a game you can play just sitting round a table at
a dinner party, and that is called - some people may have heard it as Empire, some people may have
heard it as Maggie Thatcher's Tea Party, that's what I always called it growing up, I'm sure there
are 100 other variations, 100 other names for it, but it's essentially a memory game and a guessing
game. So you can play this with anything really, but of course for this video we're going to play
it with literary characters. Everyone around the table thinks of one example of that category.
Let's say we're going literary characters. I might think of Peter Rabbit. So I write down
Peter Rabbit, put it into a hat in the middle. The person next to me writes down Peter Pan,
puts that in the middle. Two Peters in a row, just a coincidence. Someone over there writes
Sherlock Holmes, puts that in the hat. So on so on. Once everyone's put their names in, one person
reads out every single name from the list twice through, and that is it. From there you just have
to remember them. The next part of the challenge is identifying who everyone is. So for example if
my neighbour turns to me and asks “Emma, are you Sherlock Holmes?” I say “no I'm not” and it's now
my turn. I can then ask anyone around the table, but let's say I then ask him “are you Peter Pan?”
which we remember that he was. He has to say “yes I am Peter Pan” and he then joins my team. We can
then confer. So I might have forgotten some of the names on the list, he might have remembered some
of the names on the list, so we can talk between ourselves and we're trying to get everyone round
the table into our team. You'll end up eventually having two opposing teams, because there's only
two people left in the game whose names haven't been guessed yet, and then whichever one of those
is the first to correctly remember and identify the other person's character, or book title, or
whatever you're playing with, wins. Get the gist? It's a very simple game, very easy to get going
with it, there's no more complicated rules than that, but it's a really fun and like surprisingly
hard game. Number two is a bookish variation on the game Balderdash. I love this one. So for this
everyone needs a book. I'm gonna grab one off my shelf here . . . here, I have an old coffee
stained proof copy of A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. The finished copy looks like this, it's
much shinier, and it's got less coffee on it. It's a very good book though. So this is what we're
going for. So round one, let's say I'm kicking it off and I pick A Thousand Ships, so I show
everyone around the circle, this is the book, this is the cover, and I also read them the description
on the back: This is the women's war, just as much as it is the men's. And the poet will look
upon their pain. The pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story,
victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men. And he will tell it or he will tell nothing at
all. They have waited long enough for their turn. So everyone gets an idea of what this book is,
so now everyone else except for me is going to write down what they think the first line of
this book could be. And meanwhile I'm going to write down the actual first line. Okay so once
I've got the real first line, plus however many other fake first lines we have in the group,
I'm going to collect them all together, shuffle them up and read them all out,
and everyone votes for which they think is the real first line. If you correctly identify the
real first line you get a point, and if anyone votes for your fake first line you get two points.
Game number three is another of those that I don't really know the real name for. We always called
it the fishbowl game in my group of friends. You might call it the put names in a hat game,
it really doesn't matter, this is how it works. Everyone is going to write down onto scraps of
paper - let's say three each depending how many people you have, you might want to reduce that
if there's too many but let's say three each - literary characters. Fold those names up, put them
in the hat, and then you divide your group into two opposing teams. There are then three rounds
of this game. Round number one is Articulate. We're going to take turns to set a timer, and I
have let's say 45 seconds to go through as many of these names I can pull out of the hat as possible
by just describing them. I can't read the name out but I just describe it to my team and as
soon as they guess it I can do the next one, so we see how many I can get in 45 seconds.
Then pass over to the other team. Keep going until all of the names are gone - that was round one.
So then, both teams keep track of how many right answers they got each, and then they put all the
names back into the hat and round two can begin. In round two you are only allowed to say one word.
Say I pulled out the name Peter Pan, I might say Neverland and hope that my team could remember the
answer is Peter Pan. So the same thing goes, keep going back and forth until all the names are gone,
you then note that score down as well, and finally round number three is Charades. This time you do
the same thing but you're not allowed to speak at all. Again there are loads of variations of
this game, I know people who have so many extra rounds at the end that just keep getting harder
and harder - like you can only do one pose, and people have to work out what that is,
or a facial expression, you have to guess what that is. Get silly with it, do whatever you
want. Game number four is a childhood classic that always makes me laugh and that is writing a story
together. So there are kind of two main ways you could do this. There's the classic one where you
just say a word each and go around the circle and the story gets completely bizarre, or you could
do a slightly more complicated version with a pen and paper. So for this one I need my book again.
I would pick what I think is a really good line from a book, so this first page I opened it, I
would write down on my piece of paper for example, “it's not the summer sickness, a man called out,
this is something else”. Sounds very topical. I then pass that piece of paper to my right,
and the person next to me writes what they think the next line of that story could be, but
then they fold over the paper so that my line is hidden, and you keep going, so that every time you
get given a piece of paper, you can only see the line that the person immediately before you wrote,
you can't see anything further up. So the story is going to go completely off piste, always ends
up hilarious. Game number five is Just a Minute. I used to play this as a child on like long car
journeys with my parents, but you can of course make it bookish. So Just a Minute, if you don't
remember the old radio game, is when you are given one minute, 60 seconds exactly, to talk about a
topic, but you are not allowed any hesitation, no deviation, and no repetition. I think you're
allowed to repeat words like “and” and “the”, you have to decide in advance with your group which
words you're letting slip through the cracks. Other than that, you're not allowed to repeat
yourself. So for a bookish version you would set a timer and you have 60 seconds to describe the plot
of a book to somebody without hesitating for a second, without deviating from the topic,
and without repeating any names, words, key places etc. If you've seen me struggle through the books
in 20 seconds game that we play here on this channel you might have an idea of how bad I have
always been at this game. Game number six - you may already be very familiar with the game Heads
Up, it's a very very popular phone game where one person holds a phone up to their forehead
and everyone else they're playing with can see the word that's written there, and they have to
act it out to them. And as soon as you get it right you nod and move on to the next one. And the
extra fun thing is that the phone is constantly filming everyone that you're playing with, so you
can then watch back the video of them acting it out afterwards and it's very funny. And there are
loads and loads of different packs that you can play with in Heads Up including loads of bookish
ones. This one’s really just a hint for you, you probably already have Heads Up on your phone,
most people do, to go and look for some of the bookish games to play. And then for my final three
I'm going to tell you about games you can actually go and buy. So the first of those is Papercuts.
That is a literary version of Cards Against Humanity. If you don't know how Cards Against
Humanity or any of those kinds of games work, the basic premise is you have two sets of cards.
One of them has a sentence that's missing a word, you can fill in the blank,
and then you've got another much bigger pack of cards with loads of options for how you could fill
in that blank. And you take turns. If it was my turn I would turn over one of the question cards,
everyone else can use the cards from their hands to pick what they think would be the funniest way
to fill in that blank, then they'll get shuffled and given to me and I choose the funniest. So it's
really just a competition as to how funny your friends think you are. In Papercuts you have one
set of cards with questions like “What did Robert Frost find on the road less traveled by?” and
another bigger set of cards with answers like, for example, “Slaughterhouses one two three and four.”
Then I've got this fantastic game 221b Baker Street. This is a Sherlock Holmes puzzle game,
I'm gonna open it up. You have a board that looks like this and you move around it with a little
figure of Sherlock. Every time you play the game it's completely different, because every time you
get a brand new card with a brand new mystery. For example case number 21: the adventure of the
rewritten death. Each time the card will tell you what you're trying to solve that time. So it'll
tell you a whole story and then in this example you're trying to find out a) who killed the actor,
I guess there's an actor in the story, and b) the motive. The game is afoot! And so you set
off around the board. Every time you go into one of those buildings on the board you will get the
chance to flick to a particular clue in the clue book until you have solved the mystery, and then
you head back to Scotland Yard and win the game. And then finally, possibly the ultimate game for
book lovers is Bookchase. So this game is kind of a combination of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit
and being a book nerd. So a board that looks like this, just like the Trivial Pursuit one, and you
move around answering questions about books. Then you also can land on chance cards that say things
like “a bookworm nibbles one of your books and you have to leave one behind in the corner”. And
possibly the most fun thing about this game is that your player is a bookcase, and as you get
things right you collect little books to put on the case. How cute is this? I have War and Peace,
I've got Treasure Island, look how sweet that is! So those are nine of my all-time favourite
literary games. As you can guess I am always looking for more people to play with me - and
more suggestions of your favourite bookish games, so do leave them in the comments below because I
will definitely play them. And I will link here to a playlist of all the times we have played
games here on Book Break, so do click through and have a browse, and I'll see you next time!