Hey bookworms, I hope you’re having a great week. If you’re anything like me, you love books, games, and especially book-related games! There are few things as satisfying as combining hobbies🥰 I, therefore, decided my blog is the perfect place to talk about any bookish games I play. Today’s game is a poem-making, dice-rolling game called “Book Reprocessing Machine #5”.
Creator: Tenbear
Platform: Itch.io
Type of Game: Physical
Year Published: 2020
Descriptors: Generator, Poems, Dice rolling, Singleplayer
About Book Reprocessing Machine #5
I randomly stumbled upon this game when my husband bought a bundle of games on Itch.io (I had never heard of it before). It’s a website where people can host, sell, and download indie games, zines, comics, and music. Anyway, I was curiously rifling through them and this one stood out to me because I enjoy word games. So even though I’m not a poet in any sense of the word, I figured I’d try it out.
The creator says it was inspired by the concept of “blackout poems” where every word on the page is blacked out except those in the poem. The general idea is to roll 5 six-sided dice (5 d6) and, always counting from the start, add up the totals to:
- Pick a chapter
- Pick a page in that chapter
- Pick one word on that page
- Repeat until you have a pool of 50 words you can use to craft a poem
Other relevant rules:
- The poem has to be about a subject other than the one your book is about
- You don’t have to use every word but you can only use each word on your list once
Playing The Game
I picked two books I own and asked Instagram which book I should use to make my poem. The winner by a huge margin was “The Song of Achilles“.
My Available Words
From Ch 18: her, eyes, impatient, gracious, greetings, sweltering, it, are, days, anger
From Ch 16: to, they, forward, urged, waiting, had, to, creating, explain, me
From Ch 14: said, I, I, sorry, fear, know, whorled, eastern, yellow, sails
From Ch 13: her, way, thing, quite, father’s, far, to, side, the, island
From Ch 17: happening, him, did, a, not, rest, the, news, heads, turned
My Poem
I wrote a short poem about a little girl waiting for her father to return home from a long voyage. I hope knowing that context makes my poem more intelligible 😂
Waiting the sweltering days, impatient
Her eyes are fear, anger whorled
Eastern island quite far
I know not the way
Explain to me: “Sorry, I had to“
***
Gracious news! (heads turned)
Her father’s yellow sails urged forward to greetings
They rest.
My Thoughts on Book Reprocessing Machine #5
I was in high school the last time I wrote a poem so I’m actually pretty pleased with how it turned out! I enjoyed the process but it is very time-consuming and a LOT of dice rolling. At first, I wanted to write two poems but then I saw how long it took me to write one and nope. Maybe later.
I realized later that I could just have rolled virtual dice (hello not having to do tons of quick counting😂) but I did enjoy the satisfaction of rolling my pretty dice.
Other thoughts I had while rolling my dice:
-I tried not to land on too many repeat words, if I did I re-rolled.
-You might have to be flexible to the specific book. For example, my book didn’t have many pages per chapter (so I only used 1 d6 when choosing the page).
-Because we’re only using 5 six-sided dice, the range of numbers you can roll is 5-30. On average, you will roll more middle numbers. In terms of rolling for words, we’ll only be able to pick from the top of the pages which can be quite limiting. However, that is kind of the point of the game: to challenge yourself by having a limited amount of words and I can say it was challenging!
Overall, I think if you’re a big fan of word games or an author this might be a fun writing exercise to try out.
Let’s chat in the comments!
Have you played any bookish games lately? Or do you ever write poems?
Wow, I think that turned out great!! Very fun!
Thanks Leslie 😀 It was more fun than I was expecting honestly, but also a lot of work! haha