It’s almost that time again! This is the fourth year of Game of Books, intended to incentivise reading and focus not on the total number of books read, but balancing a variety of goals like reading longer books, finishing up books in a series, reading books I’ve had on my TBR for longer…

In any case, everyone’s welcome to join in! I suggest you read through my ramble about how it works if you haven’t encountered the idea before, but skip to the end if you just want the spreadsheet!

So this year I’m personally trying to lean really hard on reading things I enjoy. Accordingly, the “joy factor” I’ve previously used has been scrapped — I’d get more points for reading books I hated, which was silly! I don’t think I did read anything I hated for that, but I did keep on with books I would probably have stopped. Also, I was supposed to guess the joy factor of a book before reading it, and that just never really worked.

So, instead I have the “enjoyment” column, which rewards me for DNFing, for being so excited about books I babble at my wife about them, for picking up a book to read the first page and accidentally getting halfway through, etc.

I’ve also nixed the one that rewards me for taking longer over reading a book, because if I can’t read a book in a couple of days, I’m probably not having fun, and that is not good.

I do also want to read books I’ve owned for longer, keep up with reading books in a series, and reward reading longer books.

Here’s my full setup:

Points	Acquisition	Length (pages)	Series	Enjoyment	Bonus
1	2020, reread, ARC, library book	0-100	Not in a series/not going to read more of the series	Finished it	For each 100 pages over 500
2	2018-2019	101-200	First book in a series	DNFed it	ARC 2019-2020
3	2016-2017	201-300	Middle book of a trilogy	Was so excited I infodumped at Lisa	ARC 2018 and older
4	2014-2015	301-400	Last book of a trilogy, middle book of a series	Read the first page and accidentally ended up halfway through	Book club book read on time
5	2011-2013	401-500+	Last book of a series (to date)	Read in 1-3 sittings	Read within a week of purchase or borrowing

I’ve made my monthly goal 220 points. To work that out, I tallied up how some random books I enjoyed from 2019 would score in the new system, and figured out the average score (11), and then multiplied that by how many books I would want to read each month if I was setting a simple reading goal. In theory, then, I can read fewer than 20 books as long as I enjoy them a lot or finish series I’m reading or whatever scores the high points. This usually gets revised a bit when I have a feel for how it’s going.

And that’s it! Feel free to share, join in, modify it however you wish (the idea is to ignore simplistic targets of books read to incentivise your ideal reading experience — which won’t be the same as mine!) and have fun with it!

You can find the spreadsheet here, and then:

• Claim a sheet that isn’t already named (or duplicate the template sheet)
• Rename it to your name/blog name/a unique identifier
• Click on the arrow next to it and select “Protect the sheet”
• Set it so only you can edit your own sheet
• Copy over anything you want from the template
• Personalise
• Fill in throughout the year!
• Profit???