In this series, I talk about solo gaming, specifically solo journaling games. I am mainly trying to use up my journals by playing these, and also to work on my imagination and creativity. Let me know what you think, and what I should expand on! I’m a complete beginner, so any advice is welcomed! If you’re new to the blog, you might be interested in reading about my history with tabletop RPGs and solo gaming.

Book Reprocessing Machine #5

How to get a copy of the game

You can find this game on Itch.io, I bought it in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The game normally costs $3, and you receive a 9 page PDF.

Game description

This game was an easier game to play, it requires you to get a book and the use dice to figure out words from the book to gather, and then use those words to make a poem.

From the Itch.io:

This is a game about rolling dice to gather words from books to turn into new poems that you could put into new books if you wanted to.

You use a book of your choice and five six-sided dice (5d6), along with writing utensils, of course.

You may have played something similar in school, or, as this was inspired by blackout poetry, this may remind you of that as well.

My playthroughs

As previously done, I played this through twice. My first playthrough was with my favorite Harry Potter book, year three, The Prisoner of Azkaban. I just read through the instructions and plowed through, and didn’t take a look at the examples. When not looking at the examples, I found the steps a little repetitive; I got a lot of the same pages over and over again (I got 15, 17, and 19 a lot) and would sometimes even get the same word. If this happened, I just rolled again for the page number or the word number. Since this was also a book with a lot of pronouns only relevant to the Harry Potter universe (this was the chapter Harry received the Firebolt for Christmas).

Because I didn’t look at the examples, I found the steps a little repetitive; I got a lot of the same pages over and over again (I got 15, 17, and 19 a lot) and would sometimes even get the same word. If this happened, I just rolled again for the page number or the word number.

The directions said to repeat from the second step, which confused me because I didn’t know what the second step was, so I stayed in one chapter (this was the chapter Harry received the Firebolt for Christmas). Since this was also a book with a lot of pronouns only relevant to the Harry Potter universe. I also am terrible at poetry, so I’m not entirely sure what made me want to try this out, but I tried to make the poem about addiction? Admittedly, a subject I know nothing about.

The second playthrough I looked at the directions again, and saw that the example had groups of words from different chapters, and did 5 chapters with 10 words each. I guess this makes more sense, but if the first step was “grab a book” and the second step was “roll six dice to determine the chapter”, then I used my second book with that respect.

My second book was an instructional book, because I thought it would be fun to try it with a book that was not only non-fiction, but it was intended for teaching purposes. This book was the Affinity Designer Workbook. (I have all three workbooks, but Designer is probably my favored program, because I love vector work :))

My journal

This journal is still the novel journal from last time (you can see pictures of the covers and a brief summary of the notebook on that page), as well as pictures of the insides and the end pages.

Here are the scans! Click on the picture to view the larger image; I will be transcribing them shortly, as I know they are hard to read!