ROOB: Reading Our Own Books Game

I love to participate in challenges and to play games. You might remember that I lost the last one: BLOB. Oh well, I had fun. So much fun, in fact, that I joined another Twitter-born game that will start in April: Reading Our Own Books Challenge (ROOB) .

The general goal is to read books that we owned before March 15, 2010. This is similar to a clear off your shelves or TBR challenge, but we have a point system to make the competition a bit more fun.

The Points

• −5 points for reading a book from your TBR stack (owned before 3/15)
  
• −3 points for reading a review copy (review promised in April)
  
• −2 points for reading a library copy
• +6 points for reading a new book (owned or borrowed after 3/15)

The person who reads only from her TBR will win, but most of us have a library book or two and at least one review commitment. Unfortunately, I have a few review commitments, so will likely lose ROOB too, but I'm going to have fun playing!

Playing and Scoring

We count books started no earlier than April 1 and finished no later than April 30. Books started in March but finished in April and books started in April but finished in May do not count for the ROOB game. (I'm holding off starting some books, trying desperately to finish up others!)

At the end of the month we add up our points. The ROOB winner is the person with the lowest score. If I read 4 books from my TBR stack, 2 review copies, 3 library books, and 1 new book, here's how I'd figure my score:

(4 × −5) + (2 × −3) + (3 × −2) + (1 × 6) = −20 + −6 + −6 + 6 = −26

Now some of you may be wondering about reading speed and size of the books read. For example, I may read 10 books a month but someone else may read 15. I might read two 500-page books, but another player reads ten 100-page books What to do? No worries, we came up with a equalizer: We simply divide our final points by the number of books read.

So for our example, my final score would be −26 ÷ 10 = −2.6

The best strategy for winning is to read books you've owned for a while and that are not specifically for an April review or blog tour. There is a big penalty for reading new books.

The point to this game is to motivate us to read some of the older books we've been dying to read. I can't find the down side to playing ROOB.

The Players

• Vasilly (Natasha) from 1330v
• Carrie from Books and Movies
• Jennifer from The Literate Housewife Review
• Sarah from Puss Reboots
• Michelle from GalleySmith
• Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

Honorary member: Jen from Devourer of Books

Winning

The winner is the person with the lowest score at the end of the month. The prize is bragging rights as the ROOB champion, until we play again. The losers will each pick a book from her stacks and send it the winner. I wonder, Is that prize or punishment for the winner?

Starting Your Own Game

If you'd like to start your own group or play solo along with us, feel free! We capped the number of players for our group at eight so that it would fairly easy to keep track of scores and so the winner would not be flooded with too many new books in May.

This is all for fun and not meant to exclude anyone. If you're on Twitter, then you know two things: (1) Twitter pressure is the strongest force on earth and (2) if you pop off Twitter for even a second, you lose out!

April is shaping up to be a great month for reading: ROOB and the Readathon (more on that later in the week).