Roll Again: A Book of Games to Play

by Jon Stone (Editor), Kirsten Irving (Editor)

Looking for a different kind of challenge? Here’s a collection of rules and instructions – for games to play on your own, with friends or enemies, outside or in. Most are designed to be very short, but one or two may last a week, a month, or a lifetime. There are role-playing games, dice games, creative games and battles, extracts from the likes of H. G. Wells and Charles Cotton as well as new work by contemporary writers.

But 'Roll Again' is also an experiment in literary form – it includes texts which are more poem than game. It urges readers to dive into the ambiguous space between imagining and enacting, and in so doing rethink the meaning of everyday experiences.

118 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2022

About the author

Jon is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher who specialises in amalgams: hybrids, mixtures, collections and crossovers, of poem and game, fantasy and realism, curation and composition.

Many of the books he publishes are multi-author anthologies, co-conceived and edited with Kirsten Irving, designed to bridge the gap between poetry and other genres, including writing on games and film, nature guides, activity books and comics.

He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012, the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016 and the Live Canon International Poetry Prize in 2018. His research on poem-game hybrids was published as a monograph, 'Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames', in 2022.

Reviews

[Andy Horton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about games which is itself game-like, ludic. Done if these are absurd, some whimsical, some surreal, many are poetic or reflective, and few are playable. And that is itself part of the game,