The bookmark is the game

Brave the Book is a design contest entry that isn’t a great game but has a big ‘Hey, look at this!’ factor.

The elevator pitch is that Brave the Book turns any book into a dungeon crawl! The reality is that it turns any book into a solitaire word puzzle. 

The game is actually a bookmark that you put at the back of a book. The bookmark shows tiers of monsters that you work your way down but pulling the bookmark up. The lower the monster, the more letters it takes to spell its name.

Choose a number. Go that many pages further into the book and look at the first of that number of words on that page. Can you spell the name of the monster with the letters in those words? You beat that level. Otherwise, try again. Get though the book before you defeat each tier, you lose.

There are other flourishes but that’s the core idea. One game element I like is that you have balance using a big number to increase your chances of spelling a monster with running out of pages. That creates balance and tension. Unless you are using War and Peace.

The game went through some interesting variations, including having a second bookmark that is a player character, each one with a special power. (Which does add some theme to the experience) While the final contest version went back to one bookmark (and streamlined other elements), I imagine the designer will go back to player character book marks if they develop the game further.

What Brave The Book really makes me think of is the book-based cypher that Sherlock Holmes cracks at the start of The Valley of Fear. (Indeed, that’s all I remember of that book. The Valley of Fear is no Hound of the Baskervilles) That goes a long way toward making me enjoy the game :D

Brave the Book is more of an exercise in novelty than a game. I doubt I’ll get a lot of replay out of it but the sheer oddity is appealing. And makes me want to revisit Warchon.