Colorful animal cards, two for each letter, come with instructions for some familiar games and tips for inventing new ones.
Two players try to get rid of their cards first by playing them onto face-up cards that share at least one of three design features.
Up to four players try to fit all of their colored pieces onto the square board while preventing other players from doing the same.
In this form of tabletop pool, playable in a hundred ways, my favorite game involves flicking colored wooden rings into the corner pockets.
Each player tries to fit all of his wooden “buildings” into the square town around the cathedral while keeping his opponent from doing so.
Beat your opponent by making a row of four checkers in this game, once played by seamen using a chest with a slotted lid.
In a twist on Connect Four, players “gobble up” each other’s pieces—but if you move a piece that has gobbled, don’t forget what’s underneath it!
If Aunt Nelly were a car, what kind would she be? A dump truck, a Model T Ford, a Beetle, or—? You ask the questions about people everyone else knows. Players who pick the most popular answer advance on the board.
Tilt the board’s top to pilot the small steel ball through the maze without letting it drop through any of the holes.
This game pits your ears against your eyes. What common phrase do you hear when you say “Ask rude arrive her”?
The “maker” tries to place wooden discs in five rows of one color each; the “breaker” tries to keep it from happening. Then they switch roles.
A wooden box has a spring-mounted partition that holds red, blue, and yellow wooden discs in place. Players compete to see who can remove discs worth the most points before the partition shifts.
This variant on the nineteenth-century Reversi has two players sandwiching, and thereby capturing (and flipping over), each other’s stones on a square board. It’s hard to tell who will win until the game is almost over.
A fast-paced version of Go, Pente proclaims as the winner the first person who places five stones in a row or captures ten stones belonging to an opponent.
This hilarious game from the early twentieth century is best when bought with a bell, which players slap at the end. You try to trade cards with other players until you have all nine cards of one agricultural commodity (coffee, oranges, corn, etc.)—a corner on the market.
Several portable, battery-operated versions of the popular arcade game have remarkably satisfying lights, sounds, and action.
This game of four-in-a-row, handsomely designed in wood, makes each player choose the piece to be played by her opponent.
In a variation on tic tac toe, players pick one of twenty-five cubes from the board’s edge, turn it to expose an X or an O, and replace it on another edge. The winner is the first to get five in a row.
To win this game, playable by two to four players, you must move your pawn and locate your “fences” so that you cross the board before anyone else does.
Players try to be the first to identify sets of three cards on which every feature (there are four) is different or every feature is the same. The greatest number of sets wins.
This traditional pub game uses two dice and a shallow box lined with felt. Along one side are wooden keys labeled 1-12 that can stand up or be pressed down. Each player rolls the dice and presses down keys in any combination that equals the value shown on the dice. A turn ends when keys can no longer be pressed down. The player with the lowest score wins the round.
With or without the timer, you maneuver a steel ball through an elaborate and colorful plastic labyrinth.
An enormous deck of cards reproduces colored posters and other detailed images. Each player studies one card for ten or twenty seconds before another player tests his memory.
Two players advance their competing armies. Soldiers with higher numbers defeat those with lower numbers, and the game is over when one army’s flag has been captured.
Advance your token through different rooms in the house and try to guess, on the basis of cards in your hand and those of your opponents, who killed Mr. Boddy, in which room, and with which weapon.
The sinuous plastic rods are somewhat harder to remove without disturbing the pile than traditional straight pickup sticks would be.
Set up the plastic cars in a traffic jam as shown on a card (four decks are available), and then try to maneuver them so that one central vehicle can drive off the board.
The board looks like an egg carton with the addition of a big hole, or kalah, at each end. Each egg pocket holds three to five stones, which the two players take turns distributing as each tries to get the lion’s share.
