Board Game Review: Bring Your Own Book

Bring Your Own Book is a party game designed by Matthew Moore and published by Gamewright Games.

The concept behind Bring Your Own Book is pretty simple. The game consists of a deck of cards and a timer. The cards have various prompts on them, like "The name of a luxury car" or "a pickup line." Each turn, a player acts as a Judge, and they draw a card and pick a prompt.

Each player takes a book--any book--and then has a certain amount of time to find a passage on the book that matches with the prompt. It can be a word, a sentence, a phrase--whatever. Players then read them out loud, and the judge picks the best one. First player to win five cards wins the game.

What I Liked About The Game:

• It's incredibly simple, and it's incredibly fun. That short, sweet description I listed above is literally it. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a complete blast.
• Since you can literally "bring your own book," each game can be wildly different. Playing with a trivia book is worlds different than playing with a medical textbook--and since each player has a different book, each answer is going to be much different.
• The card ideas are very fun. You'd think there was a limited number of things that would apply to this, but we played so many games and each one was pretty good. 

What I Didn't Like About The Game:

• About the only thing I can see people not liking is if you have players who get frustrated easily and they have a book that just doesn't quite match the prompt, they may not have a lot of fun.

This is one of the better party games I've played lately, and I highly recommend it. It may only work with the right crowd and with a right selection of books, but it shouldn't be that difficult.