Wednesday 27 April 2011

How To Play

GameBoard designed by my rather amazing Boy - thankyou

Bookcrossing Monopoly is a wild releasing game, with challenges each turn (a turn is two weeks) and points to earn... the team with the most points at the end wins
Each turn, the gamehost (hem... me, Vekiki) will role the virtual dice and move the pieces... where will you land?
Your team has the length of the turn (two weeks) to complete the challenge you have landed on (more details below), and post on the forum with a link to your released book (you can release more than one book if you want, but you have to nominate only one to count towards the game)
The game will last 15 turns (30 weeks) - if you choose not to play for a turn or two, that's fine, but you won't earn any points that turn
The winner is the person or team with the most points after the last turn

The Different Kinds of Square:
Types of square that you may land on the board are:
- Location Squares: like in normal monopoly, most of the squares are locations - simply wild release a book at that location and claim your point! You can be as imaginative as you like in how you define a 'tree' or 'rainbows end' - the more original your idea, the better
- Community Bookshelf: If you land on a bookshelf square, you need to pick any other monopoly player (not in your team!) and send them a wishlist book. This is the only time that controlled releases count in this game.
To clarify: your team still gets a catch when a wishlist book you sent is received - AND the team you post to gets a point for the catch as well. It follows the same rules as any other book in play with points for re-releases too.
- Local Meet up / BC Convention: O-Oh! You get tempted by the book buffet and take more books than you leave... lose a point :(
- Planes and trains: make a release on public transport - trains or planes, buses or  (Boris) bikes... Bally's on the move!
- Chance: take a chance card.... no way to guess what that may be...
- Achoo / In Bed With Flu / Just Visiting: if you land on the Achoo square - Oh No! Looks like you are ill. You sneeze propels you forward to Bed, and you must sit this turn out while you recover. But, if the role of the dice lands you on the bottom left hand corner square, you're safe - just visiting a friend while they are ill - how nice. Your friend is so grateful that they give you one of there points! But who are you visiting? Well, that is up to you - you must do a release themed around the team who's point you want to steal
- Free Release: Go Wild!
- Super-speed Release: Quickly Quickly! You only have half a turn - one week - to make a quickie release!
- Go! This is where we all start, and as you travel the board during the game, you get to make an extra release when you pass Go...

And... if you complete all the challenges of a particular colour, you get to make an extra release themed to that colour

Scoring points:
One point each for any of the following:
  • challenge book released
  • book caught
  • AF sign up to BC
  • Book re-released
  • successful hunting of another team's Monopoly book
  • and... Bonus points
Bonus points are given out by the gamehost for special releases - but she's very hard to impress.... Try to theme the book to your location, or making your bookdrop in fancy dress, or anything to catch her eye and make your team stand out

The Teams:
We form teams 3 players  each- how you delegate who does each challenge in your team is up to you
Teams will be announced on Friday 6th May

Join In:
The game - and the reserve list - are now full, so no more people can sign up to play, sorry (this was much more popular than I was expecting, if i run it again I'll try to plan for more people, but let's see how this goes first).
Players: I am currently organising your teams. Mention if there is another player who you'd like to be on a team with (or if there's someone you definitely don't want to team up with)
Teams will be announced Thursday 5th May

Game starts Monday 9th May, and new turns will be announced every other Monday. Turns will be announced here, and on the Release Challenges forum on the main BC site

Once we get going, you can email photos of your releases to Vekiki and she'll include them on the weeks page (at the minute, it's best to PM Vekiki on the bookcrossing site, as that links to her main email which gets checked more frequently)

(oh... erm.. it's just for fun, and to claim the title as BCMP Champions - no actual prizes!) 


I bet there are questions; look below and see if someone beat you to it, or go over to the Release Challenges forum thread and ask 'em. I'll do my best to explain; I've never hosted anything like this before, so I'm still learning , plus I'm sure there'll turn out to be stuff I haven't thought of... in which case we shall fill in any blanks as we come across them.

Some Questions so far: 
(I've put the 'out of date' questions about things like picking teams in smaller font to help you find the stuff that is still relevant)

* I'd rather not be in a team with x, or on a team called y, is that ok?
Sure - not everyone gets along with everyone else, that's just a fact of human life. if you let me know, I won't make you team up with any particular person. Ditto team names. the team names  are based on the token that you play with in Monopoly - and if you're anything like my family, everyone has a favourite 'lucky' token... 
*Do I need to be in the same country as my team mates? 
nope! you can communicate via email / PM. 

* I'm not very confident with my english skills, it's not my first language, can I still play?
Sure thing, Bookcrossing knows no language boundaries!  English is my mother tongue and I make mistakes all the time with spelling and grammar rules (and typos. If you haven't noticed yet, trust me you will!) I would advise though  to request at least one team mate who is a confident English speaker - simply because i will always be posting in english  (the only other language I speak is Dranasian Secret Sign language, which is very hard to type) and it may cause problems otherwise. You can either request a friend to team with to help you translate, or let me know and I'll try to find you another player who speaks English and at least a little of whatever your native tongue may be. We're shaping up to be a pretty global game! 

* Can I count books from other challenge games towards this?
Sure!

* What if i'm busy or go on holiday?
because there's a team of you, if your busy and can't act promptly, your team-mates will be able to take that challenge instead
To be clear, you play as a team - so as long as one of your team does the challenge, your covered. And even if you decide to sit a turn out, that's fine, just you don't get the points :)

* What if my team and I can't get to a suitable release spot?
you can interpret them however you like. So one spot is castles and palaces: now, not everyone can get to a real castle - but you can build a sand castle... or leave a book in front of a painting of a palace in an art gallery... or find a toy shop with toy castles... or maybe something to do with the castle pieces in chess? Or... well... anything you can come up with. Creative thinking is your friend - and will earn you bonus points! 

*Will mailing to other players cost a lot and mean I have to keep going to the post office?
the controlled releasing is only involved if you land on a bookshelf space - the equivalent of community chest on a normal monopoly board. And as you're in teams, you can discuss with your team who will do the book posting. As it's a pretty international game, you should be able to find players close-ish to home. (or maybe even close enough to pass books by hand) plus, of course, if you do land on that square, it's not compulsory, you can sit that turn out

*How will I know when each turn is posted?
Before the game starts, I'll send a PM out to everyone with their team on it, and just after that the first turn will be posted on the forum - I won't be PMing each turn out to every individual as I just don't have time to do that each fortnight - but I'll be posting in the release challenges forum, and here on the blog.
I'll be posting the turns each fortnight on a Monday, so you can just check then for your challenge - though of course if you drop in on the forum more often you can see what other teams are up to and get inspiration, chatter... speculate about who's winning...

*Can my team release as many books as we like?
Well... yes, you can release them. But only one book per team per challenge will count towards the game, you need to send me a link to that book's release notes to claim your point. Some weeks you may get the opportunity to do two challenges

* How do we as a team decide on our release - just pick one between us and do it, or do one each then choose the most creative to submit for the game?How you decide each turn within your team is up to you guys - maybe you come up with better ideas by brainstorming together first, or maybe you all want to make a release so you just pick names out of hats, or maybe one of you has a great idea and another person acts it out... however you choose to play, as long as the team is happy with it, is fine.

*What do we need to do to claim our points?
All you have to do is send an email to me ( bcmonopoly at mail dot com ), with a link to the book (I say email rather than PM as PMs sometimes go missing...). Giving me a bit more info about why you choose that release if you want - or include it in the release notes, it helps me see how the challenge was done and that makes picking who gets bonus points easier.
You can post on the forum as well if you choose, it's nice and is fun for people to watch the turn unfold, but it's not necessary to claim your points
Likewise pictures are fun to see, and if you send them I will include them in the blog, but they are not 'compulsory'
so all you HAVE to do to get the point is email me a link to the book's page.
The same applies for claiming points in case of a book getting caught / re released / new member sign up / etc... to claim your point just email the link to me. If you then want to go and gloat on the forum, well, who am I to stop you?!


If I email you photos, what happens with them?
I'll post them here on the blog! I'll be doing a sort of weekly write up of all the completed challenges and photos will be included in that. I considered doing a flicker account or somesuch, but decided it was nicer to have everything all in one place, and i dont; mind the extra work uploading a photo album.
If you prefer, you can include pictures in the release notes for the book instead (or as well), or just not have photos.

* Do teams get a bonus point if they complete one colour on the board?
Not bonus points - they get to do a book release themed around that colour, so they get points for the release / catches/ etc that come with that. They could earn a bonus point too on that release, same as any other.
The turn that they land on the final location of the colour, that is the turn they have to make the colour-release too (so... say you have 2 red done already, then next turn you land on the third red... you have to do a book release for the location, and one for the colour, in the two weeks of that turn - in any order)

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