Margaret Hofer

Boasting selections from the Liman Collection at the New-York Historical Society, this is a small coffee table book of tremendously fun American board and tabletop games, primarily from the years 1875-1920 and categorized loosely along theme, including morality games, sporting games, war games, and my personal favorite, conversation games.

The strength of the book is in the relative lack of the traditional race games that most people visualize generically as a "board game." The selections are all bright and colorful, usually represented by board art but sometimes by box or cover art, and occasionally accompanied by playing pieces or components such as printed cards. The best two-page spreads include three or four games that are clearly inspired by, or consciously improve upon, each other, such as variations on "Errand Boy," "The Pretty Village" and "Fish Pond."

Most of the selections are modern enough to enjoy the art and frequent cultural references without significant explanation, but the book's limitations are still to be found - or rather, not found - in the sparse text. While it is helpful to know what conflicts the war games depict or why certain cultural subjects were of interest at the time, that tends to be the extent of descriptions; several games get no description beyond their name, publisher, date and location of origin, while those that do get just a few sentences. As a result, the context can be extremely limited; most notably, we only rarely learn how any game is played.

This a sweet and pleasant little volume that doesn't take up too much shelf space, but it's hard not to finish a quick tour of the book without some unanswered questions. I found myself wanting to know a lot more about many of the games or why they were designed or marketed in this way.… (mer)