#%&@! I don't have friends, so my playthrough turned into more of a dissection than a playthrough. I don't want that to come across as wholly different from my standard playstyle; I'm always looking to just find whatever I find fun; whether it's explicitly given to me or I have to implicitly draw it out for myself isn't really a damnable sentence for a game, after all the most popular games by far are "sandboxes" and "open worlds" where the storytelling is linked directly to the emergent behavior of the player. I attempted to use two control schemes at once to fight myself, but seeing as I only had a single controller and KBM needs both hands, all I had left was to wait out the rounds. I encountered a "soft-lock" glitch where my character got eaten by the book at the same moment they got taken to become the new monster. The next round seemed to be stuck until I killed the other player on top of me, at which point it began properly. Between the victory screen and the credits there is only one instance of music, so use it wisely; if I let the music end in either case, it will never play again.
The game is a seemingly straightforward Nerve experience, a king-of-the-hill free-for-all asymmetrical smasher. The controller glyphs seem to suggest more features than are available, as the face buttons by themselves do nothing, and only output the two basic actions upon spamming them all together randomly. The tactical effects for the "minnow" players feel minuscule, and the books seem inclined to only help the monster; perhaps some other arena object that the players can use to try and wrangle the monster while they get a few hits in.
Asymmetrical games look to differentiate the methods of play between its two factions, and not simply their consequences; Crawl gives the ghost player a wide variety of tools to try and defeat the explorer, and their comparatively limited options are leveled out by the severe difference in health from the ghosts minions. Mario Party makes most 1v3's virtually impossible to win depending on which side you play. This scenario could easily emerge from your setup, but it seems quite unique that you have to let another player get ahead in order to have a chance of getting ahead yourself next round; what you have is a dynamic that definitely warrants more exploration and more consideration.