One Idea that I have is to make a board game that the players use pawns to try to get from the beginning to the end of Jack’s adventure. They will start off in Room and pass a few important things from the room such as Jack’s fifth birthday cake, where the novel starts, and then the players will pass through Wardrobe, and under Duvet, and survive the power outage. Eventually they will have to escape like Jack did, rolled up in the rug and will be carried in Old Nick’s van. After wards they will go to the hospital and meet all of their new friends. Then the players will go to the mall and shortly after will discover the incident with Ma. They will have to go to Grandma and Steppa’s house and do activities such as go to the park and the beach. After Ma returns the players will have to go back to room and see it from the outside. Eventually, the players will end in in the apartment with Ma. This will be step up like the game Life. They will see pictures on the board of all of these events and have to draw cards that affect which paths they take with small differences but they all end up in the same major places. The first person to make it to the end of the journey will win.
This idea will connect with the entire story and it will show scenes from throughout the plot. It will include the beginning, middle, and end and will show the conflicts in the book while the players have to come across them in order to get to the end of their journey. I think that this is good for people that have already read the book and enjoyed it because they will get a chance to interact with the book and relive the events from the book. If a person plays this game that has yet to read it, they might become intrigued and want to read it for themselves so that they can gather all of the details and see how Jack dealt with all of the conflict that is portrayed in the game. This will get the book a larger fan base and more attention when the game is sold in stores and people and playing it.
The game will be set up like a basic board game and will have a path to travel down with pawns to try to get from beginning to end. The players will draw cards with different conflicts and will roll dice. This link is something that reminds me of how it would look a little bit: http://www.roomthebook.com/inside/. The game will also have objects from the book like Tooth, the Dora bag, Jack’s birthday cake, Egg Snake, etc.
Idea Two: Jack T-Shirts
For my second idea I will make t-shirts to sell that say “Jack, The Bonsai Boy” and “Jack, The Monkey Boy.” This comes from Room when Jack and Ma were in the hospital and the newspapers were discussing Jack and his escape and described him as a bonsai tree and a monkey. Jack sees this article in the book, “On the next page there’s one of me and Ma and the police the time she was carrying me into Precinct. It says HOPE FOR BONSAI BOY” (215). The article then goes on to say, “Jack says everything is ‘nice’ and adores Easter eggs but still goes up and down stairs on all fours like a monkey” (216). This will be fun for fans of the book to wear, kind of like Team Edward and Team Jacob shirts, because it gets the readers involved with the story. This shirt will also be an interesting conversation starter when people see this shirt and they haven’t read the book because the person will not understand the connection to the book. The person who is wearing the shirt will then have the opportunity to explain what the shirt and the book are about, thus attracting more people to the novel which will produce more book sales.
This is an example of what the shirts will look like and the customer can get a variety of colors such as white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, purple, or orange with white or black font color. And On the Front they will say, "Jack, The Bonsai Boy!" and "Jack, The Monkey Boy!" and then on the bottom right corner of the shirt it will say Room in the Room font that is like on the book cover.
