SOLVED. Children's/YA Fiction, two boys get involved in a "game". [s]

[Hannah]

I think the boys are younger than 13. One of the boys is bookish and less confident, the other is adventurous and has a more traditionally appealing personality. They somehow get involved in a "game", and not a video game but a fantasy-world like game. I think the adventurous one was supposed to win, but the bookish one ends up winning. A very small detail I distinctly remember is that the adventurous boy is picking pills off of his sweater, and the bookish boy tells him the vocabulary word for such an action. I don't remember the word, but according to Google either "Carphologia" or "flocillation" could have been the word. I am rather confident the book was published after 2000, a little less confident that it was published around 2005. The cover was darkly colored.

[Kris]

Hannah, what year did you read or hear about this book?

Can you describe the fantasy world and the game's rules? What creatures do they encounter?

[Hannah]

What I described above is everything I remember about the book plot wise. I really just have the vaguest memory of reading it. I read it maybe 2006-2007.

[Spockles]

Pretty certain the book is The Game of Sunken Places by M.T. Anderson. It's the first in a series of four books.

[Hannah]

Thank you Spockles! That is exactly it.