Button Men: The Book

A limited press of 23 hardcover books and a dozen or so softcover made by Rhea H. Shelley. Out of print for almost two decades, in September of 2020 it was re-released as a digital download through DriveThru's website and was the best selling product for two days in a row. As of January 2021, it is now the 203rd best seller on DriveThru Cards. It includes the exclusive set 'Order of Dolls,' now available in full quality on its own page.

Rhea Shelley, the author of the book, had this to say about the writing of the book:

> "Writing the book was a labor of love.  I was really impressed with the simplicity of Button Men, but also the incredible depth it had.  Plus, I was a collector back then, so trying to find all the different buttons was a blast.  So really, I ended up getting a lot of different buttons and wanted to keep a checklist.  There wasn’t anything official out there, so I decided to make something.
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> Then it just grew from there.  I didn’t want to just make a checklist, I wanted it to be worthy of something that would be printed.  So, I added everything I could.  I spent a lot of time talking to James and Liz to make sure I got everything correct.
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> I actually wrote and laid out the entire book in MS Word.  A lot of my job at that time was writing documents.  I knew Word inside and out and could get it to just about anything.  So, I did it there.  If you saw the layout you’d lose your mind.
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> I printed it out on 11x17 paper on our office color printer.  There were multiple documents to be printed.  I printed the first one.  Then took the printed pages, put them back in the copier and printed a second document on the back side.  Collation and flip printing and all that wasn’t available, so I had to do it all by hand in Word.  So, the very first 11x17 page had page 120 on the left half and page 1 on the right.  Then when I manually flipped the stack of paper over and printed the second document, page 2 was on the left and page 119 was on the right, so that when I cut the stack of pages, they would all be printed correctly.  And it was all laid out manually in two different Word docs.
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> It was a mental nightmare, but it was what I had to work with.
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> Self publishing also wasn’t really a thing.  So went to a small print shop by the local university where doctoral students got their Ph D.’s printed up.  It was really expensive, but I did a small print run and sold them by hand at Gen Con.  There were hard backs and soft covers."
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   The book appears to be entirely black on its front cover with gold-embossed spine showing the title and the last name of the author.

The contents of the book are as follows:

Introduction

Rules of Play

Dice Skills (Aux, Berserk, Chance, Fire, Focus, Mood, Morph, Null, Option, Poison, Queer, Reserve, Shadow, Speed, Swing, Trip, Time and Space, Turbo, Twin, and Warrior)

Multiplayer Variants

Strategies

Official Buttons (Brawl, Brom, Bruno, Buck Godot, Bunnies/Lab Rat, Buzzing Weasel, Carson, ConMan, Dork Victory, Eiko/WuLan, Fairies, Fantasy, Freaks, Girl Genius, Gordo, James Ernest, Japanese Beetle, L5R, Lunch Money, Majesty, Metamorphers, Ork!, Buttonlords, PolyCon, Renaissance, Sailor Moon, Sanctum, Save the Ogres, Sluggy Freelance, Social Class, Soldiers, Tess, Tirade, Vampyres, Vote, What's New, XXXenophile, Yoyodyne, and Zeppo)

Extras

Unofficial Sets "homemade buttons" (Blademasters, Bull, Apple Changeling, Eeyore, Japanese Beetle, Las Vegas, Order of Dolls, Rikachu the Pokepooch, Tenchi Muyo, Wonderland)

Random Button Men Generator

Checklists for all buttons featured in the book

1. ↑ https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/cheapass-games-button-men-limited-468893993
2. ↑ https://www.drivethrucards.com/product/328660/Button-Men-The-Book?src=hottest\_in\_print