Had so much fun playing this game last night with the kids. Rory’s Story Cubes is pretty straight forward.

Basically everyone gets a few dice and someone starts telling a tale. Then throws a die and has to incorporate that object into the story and the tale gets handed off to the next person and on and on it goes.

I guess it’s not a game in the traditional sense of someone winning, but we killed a solid hour going around and around the table. I can promise you one thing – you learn a LOT about your children when they have to riff on a picture of a frowny face coupled with an envelope and super counter ball thingy (an abacus to those out of the 2nd grade). The songs, books, commercials, friends names, etc. that occupy your kids’ brains all bubble to the top and spill out. So much fun.

This is a certainly gift for readers of all ages. And looking at their site, they now have a Batman branded edition as well as others that focus on ‘actions’, ‘voyages’, etc.

Anyway, check out Rory’s Story Cubes if you know of anyone learning to write or that loves stories.

Jenga is one of my all time favorite games. It couples just the right amount of skill and tension (please, please, please don’t fall!). And now some every so thoughtful folks have combined my love of books with Jenga for the Jenga: Book Lovers Edition. How cool is that?

Each block has a question on it, which you are to answer if you successfully remove the block from the teetering tower.

Questions have things like:

“What literary character would you like to be?”

“What’d your favorite children’s book?”

I am sure that if I was a true booknerd that I’d have some pithy quote about ‘books being the building blocks’, yadda, yadda… but I just want to play this game!

No doubt this would be fun to kick off a new book group or library event and if you have a booknerd on your list to buy for, then I imagine this would be a good fit.

Have you ever played Jenga: Book Lover’s Edition?

Here is a great “gifts for book lovers” that I stumbled upon: It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, is a book trivia board game all about books.

I haven’t played this one yet, but it sounds like something I’d enjoy. Basically, you and your friends move around the board while trying to identify books by their opening lines or book covers.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night has been for sale via a few sites around the interwebs for a while. The price floats around the $30 mark. A few of the book trivia categories are:

• novels
• poetry
• mysteries
• children’s books
• science fiction
• books made into movies

I have to admit that identifying a book simply by its opening line sounds tough, but maybe it’s all multiple choice. That’d be better.

Good luck and let me know if you’ve played It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. I’d like to know if it’s as fun as I want it to be.