Can you correctly identify the title or author of a book from just its first line? That's the premise of It Was a Dark & Stormy Night. If you love to read, be sure to check this game out. When my family played it, we divided up into two teams, pairing younger readers with older readers to better everyone's odds of coming up with the right answer. There are 12 different book categories in this game from children's books to novels to Shakespeare; the non-fiction and poetry categories were surprisingly easier than we thought they would be, and we did pretty well with Shakespeare's plays, too. Our least favorite categories? Mystery and Novels written from 1950-Present. We didn't know the answer on any of those. And we ALL tried to land on the squares for Children's Books and Children's Movies (adapted from books). Those were by far our favorite categories! Luckily, you don't need to answer a question from every category; you just need to identify 8 book titles to win. (Or 5 if you want to shorten the game.) I really enjoyed this game and I thought it played pretty fast (we played it twice in an hour). We had a lot of fun giving hints, and throwing out cards that we deemed too obscure, and cheering when we finally got a Harry Potter question. This bookish game was definitely a hit at our house!
Here are a few sample first lines...can you identify the book or the author they're from?
- (Poetry) There is a place where the sidewalk ends/ And before the street begins ...
- (Children's Movies) "The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette."
- (Non-Fiction) "But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction--what has that got to do with a room of one's own?"
- (Novels, Pre-1900) "Marley was dead: to begin with."
Ok, I think #1 is Shel Silverstein...Where the Sidewalk Ends, and #2 is Princess Bride. I feel like I should know #3...and you have me stumped on #4!
ReplyDeleteThank goodness for Harry Potter questions!
#3 is A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and #4 is Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
DeleteOh my goodness, my family would love this game. Thanks so much for writing about it - I'm going to have to go mark it for someone's birthday present! :)
ReplyDeleteIt's a lot of fun!
DeleteSounds like a perfect game! Will have to look for it. I wouldn't do so well on mysteries from the 1950's forward either, and not all that sure about fiction from same time period!
ReplyDeleteThose two categories were surprisingly hard. Luckily, there are a lot of other categories that are much easier (and more fun).
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