Remembering Game

The plates are cleared. Three generations are at the table. Nobody can think of anything to say.

Somebody picks up this book and reads one line out loud, and forty minutes later your father is telling a story that nobody in the room has ever heard.

THE REMEMBERING GAME is a read-aloud game for family gatherings. 150 rounds, in large print, arranged across ten tables. No board, no pieces, no scores, no winners. One person reads; everybody answers.

HOW IT WORKS

Every round has three parts printed underneath it:

- THE ROUND itself, in large clear type, so the oldest person in the room can read it out without being handed reading glasses

- THEN - a line telling you exactly how the answers go round, so the game never stalls

- YOUNGEST AT THE TABLE - an actual job for the youngest person in the room: ask the follow-up, keep the time, count the hands, write the names down. Because the youngest person is the one who usually says nothing and leaves early.

SIX KINDS OF ROUND

Everybody Answers - Quick Round - Hands Up - One Story - Ask the Eldest - Guess First - and at the end of every table, a Long Round that takes its time.

THE TEN TABLES

The House You Grew Up In - School and the Walk There - Out on the Street - The Kitchen Table - Money, Work and Making Do - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Cars, Roads and Getting Away - Sounds, Machines and Screens - Friends, Sweethearts and Trouble - What You Know Now

WHAT ELSE IS IN IT

- Ten house rules, including the one that saves every evening: nobody corrects anybody's dates

- Ten other ways to use it - a hospital room, a long drive, a Sunday phone call, a grandchild's homework

- Which rounds work over the telephone, for families spread across states

- "When to Stop, and How" - because the hardest part is stopping while it's still going well

- "Who Was at the Table" - one page to fill in on the first evening you play, and again in five years

WHO IT'S FOR

- Holidays, birthdays and anniversaries where everyone is in one room and nobody knows what to do with the afternoon

- Sunday visits to a parent or grandparent that keep running out of conversation

- Grandchildren who want in and don't know how to start

- Anyone looking for a gift for a mother or father who has a great deal to say and is almost never asked

WHY THIS ONE

Most nostalgia gift books are photograph albums. They're beautiful in the sample and flat and grey in the print, and they get flipped through in four minutes and shelved. This one is all words and all large type, so there is nothing in it that can print badly - and it isn't finished in four minutes. Five rounds is a good evening. At five rounds an evening, 150 rounds is years of visits.

Nobody is being tested and nobody can lose. "I don't remember" ends a round perfectly well. So does "pass".