Blade in the Book

Blade in the Book is a micro version of my other PnP bookmark game, Brave the Book. No table is needed to play this game since the only required components are this 2"x7.25" bookmark and a book with at least 100 pages.

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Multiplayer Rules: Race your friends to determine who is the rightful owner of Lionheart! Each player needs a copy of this bookmark and their own book. Everyone takes their turn at the same time. The first player to wield their Lionheart is the winner! If multiple players pull their sword out of their book on the same turn, the player with the lowest score wins.

Claiming the Throne (Solo/Multiplayer Variant): Once you've pulled out the sword, you can't pick any keyword other than THRONE, spell it out on a following turn to claim the throne and win the game! Note: Throne is an anagram of Lionheart.

Thorn in their Paw (Multiplayer Only Variant): THORN is now another keyword you can pick. Whenever you spell it out, target player can't use letters from any words with 7 or more letters next turn! Note: Thorn is an anagram of Lionheart.

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A little insight into how I chose the word, Lionheart:

Interestingly enough, Lionheart not only means brave (which plays into the name of its bigger bookmark game cousin) and is a compound word (yay for built-in game choices), but it also contains 7 of the top 10 most used English letters with the other two still in the top 15. When balancing the dungeon rooms in Brave the Book to have similarly-weighted words, I created a "point calculator" based on the usage and popularity of letters in English fantasy books. Using that same calculator for this game, the compound word Lionheart scores 6 points, while each of its individual words, Lion and Heart, score 3 points respectively. So, based on those calculations, the two words should be pretty balanced.