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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 1:03 pm 
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Full credit goes to AlternateTorg for the following (extremely well-written) rules, which I have shamelessly swiped and updated to fit this game.

  • The purpose of this game is to guess real lines from books while fooling others with your made-up lines.
  • We will be playing with one dasher at at time (thanks, Kitoba!)
  • A single round is played as follows:
    • IF YOU ARE THE DASHER: Choose a book: Something where the first line is pretty famous. Post the book title, author, and first single sentence. E.g., "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." - The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
      Note: since we're dealing with smaller pool of available books, I'll ask people to try to choose their book and then look up the first line, rather than looking up a bunch of first pages, just in case they end up looking at books that other people choose later. It's unlikely, but you never know ...
    • IF YOU ARE A PLAYER: Come up with a SECOND line for the book: Make up a single sentence to follow the real first line and PM it to the dasher. For example, you might PM the dasher with, "Also, I'm pretty high right now."
      • DO NOT LOOK UP THE ACTUAL OPENINGS OF OTHER PEOPLE'S BOOKS. THAT IS CHEATING!
      • When you make up fake lines, remember that you're trying to convince others that your line is the real one. Do your best to make it believable. Other players may correct your spelling and grammar if they're nice, but they're under no obligation to do so, so proofread your answers! Since the real line is supposed to be copied from the actual source, bad spelling/grammar = obvious fake.
      • If you already know the second line of someone's book, make up a fake line anyway. You'll get your chance to shine when it's time to start guessing.
    • DASHER: Post the lines: After you have received fake lines for your books from all active players, post the lines to the game thread, with the real ones placed randomly in the list. Assign a number or letter to each opening to make it easy for players to send in their guesses. Don't include the other players' names next to their openings!
    • PLAYER: Guess the lines: Read the list and try to guess which line is the real one. PM your guess to the dasher. BONUS POINTS: Guess who submitted each line.
    • DASHER: Post results: Once all the active players have guessed, post the guesses, the real answer, and how people scored.
      • Player A correctly selects the real line = +2 points for Player A
      • Player A incorrectly selects Player B's line = +1 point for Player B
      • Player A correctly matches Player B to Player B's line = +0.5 point for Player A
      • Nobody guesses the correct line = +3 points for the dasher
  • Points are tallied up and the next round begins.
  • Everyone takes a turn being the dasher. I like to make a list ahead of time and follow it, but I'm not going to rend my garments if the order gets mixed as long as everybody gets a chance. (I do not, however, recommend using the "highest scoring player goes next" rule.)
  • Please try to be timely with submitting openings as a player and tallying results if you're the dasher. If you're going to sit a round out, let us know so the dasher doesn't wait for your entry.

Sound good? Any questions? Who's in?

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 1:25 pm 
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inspiration wrote:
IF YOU ARE THE DASHER: Choose a book: Something where the first line is pretty famous. Post the book title, author, and first single sentence.


Rules query: How is 'pretty famous' defined?

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 4:01 pm 
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That you could probably pick the first sentence of the book out of a lineup, if not quote it off the top of your head. It's different for everyone, of course; just go with whatever says "classic" to you.

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 7:17 pm 
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Totally in. Already got something picked out.

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 8:39 pm 
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I'm in of course :) :sasha:

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 9:38 pm 
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Sweet! Let's get the Bookerdash gang back together!

Oh, and: new suggestion added to the rules above.

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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2012 9:44 pm 
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I'm in as well, if you'll have me.

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 9:49 am 
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Just checking - the first lines have to be famous, not just the book? I'm not even sure how to gauge that.

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 7:18 pm 
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I'm in, I suck, but I'm in. :)

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 3:40 am 
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drachefly wrote:
Just checking - the first lines have to be famous, not just the book? I'm not even sure how to gauge that.


I'm having trouble, too. Inspiration's stated rule is that I have to be able to pick the correct first line out of a lineup, which basically limits me to books that I read often. I wouldn't necessarily think of any of them as 'classics', though... doesn't a classic need to still be popular a decade or two after the author's death? That may be hard to judge when the author is still alive...

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:21 am 
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Well, I have one book with a distinct enough opening that it would definitely qualify, thankfully.

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:31 am 
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i'm in, so long as posting on weekends is ok. I may not always have computer access to get on here during the week. If that is acceptable I will play.

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:13 am 
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At first this seemed too narrow to me, but when I thought about it, I can think of a number of classics where I know the first sentence even if I have never read the rest of the book.

If I may, I'll post some suggestions, since the dasher will be posting the title and first sentence anyway. These are all books where I don't know anything else except the first sentence. I didn't google these, so I'm going on memory.

Moby Dick - "Call me Ishmael."
Out of Africa - "I had a farm in Africa"
Pride and Prejudice - "It is a truth generally acknowledged that a single man must be in want of a wife"
A Tale of Two Cities - "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
??? - "I dreamed last night I went to Mandelay"
??? - "Happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I'm betting a google search for "famous first lines" would bring up a whole list of other ones I would vaguely recognize.

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 3:25 pm 
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kitoba wrote:
"I dreamed last night I went to Mandelay"

"Manderley," actually -- Rebecca by Daphne du Marier. (Man, I love that book.) The families one is something Russian. #englishmajorfail

But that's what I mean by "pick it out of a lineup" -- I couldn't have told you the actual word-for-word opening of Catcher in the Rye, but I knew it started off with the narrator being belligerent about talking about himself; all I could cough up for Finnegans Wake was "riverrun past Eve and Adam something something indecipherable" but, again, if I'd seen it in a list of five fake first lines, I would have known it instantly.

However, despite all of this, I could not BEGIN to guess what comes after "Call me Ishmael" or any of the rest, even having read some of the books. (I realized this the other day, which is what gave me the idea for the game.)

I have no problem with people checking out lists of famous first lines to get in the groove.

Drachefly, since you have one in mind, why don't you be our first dasher and kick things off?

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:21 pm 
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My pre-pick was The Princess Bride, by William Goldman. I was somewhat alarmed upon reading the above list, as I realized that though the first line is awesome, and you could definitely map from the line to the book if you've ever read it - which was, it seemed, the criterion given - it doesn't really break into the 'famous first line' category, and if it is a classic at all, it is somewhat on the 'new' and 'only arguably literature' side... but being one of the leading reconstructionist works, I say that's good enough. And it's not all that much newer than the Catcher in the Rye, by ratio, so I'm going with it.

Yet, my difficulties were not finished. For the very very first line, which is...

William Goldman wrote:
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.


... suffers from the defect that the ensuing sentences are short and uninteresting, and moreover are predictably so. Undaunted, I instead proceed into the main text. This did not disappoint in terms of distinctiveness and opportunity for writing, though the fame of this line and certainly the venerability of the volume is no greater than before. Still, I present you with the second first line in The Princess Bride:

'S. Morgenstern', but William Goldman, really wrote:
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.

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