Overview
As families are rediscovering the joys and virtues of staying and entertaining at home, board games have surged in popularity indeed, sales doubled in the last year alone. this mirrors a trend in the late nineteenth century the heyday of American boards and table games when, fueled by the introduction of games coincided with a growing need for middle-class social entertainment.Then, like now, the games that best captured players imaginations mimicked, and sometimes poked fun at, the culture that produced them Organized around themes such as courtship, commerce, travel, sports, and city life, The Games We Played brings together over one hundred eye-catching examples of Americas rare and popular board games, such as The Game of Playing Department Store, which encourage players to accumulate the greatest quantity of goods while spending their money as economically as possible, and Bulls and Bears: The Great Wall St. Game, in which players try their hand as speculators, bankers, and brokers, yelling each other down as if in a trading pit.
This playful visual survey of its thematic essays will cause board and table game aficionados to share in the revelry of togetherness.
Synopsis
As families are rediscovering the joys and virtues of staying and entertaining at home, board games have surged in popularity indeed, sales doubled in the last year alone. this mirrors a trend in the late nineteenth century the heyday of American boards and table games when, fueled by the introduction of games coincided with a growing need for middle-class social entertainment.
Then, like now, the games that best captured players imaginations mimicked, and sometimes poked fun at, the culture that produced them Organized around themes such as courtship, commerce, travel, sports, and city life, The Games We Played brings together over one hundred eye-catching examples of America s rare and popular board games, such as The Game of Playing Department Store, which encourage players to accumulate the greatest quantity of goods while spending their money as economically as possible, and Bulls and Bears: The Great Wall St. Game, in which players try their hand as speculators, bankers, and brokers, yelling each other down as if in a trading pit.
This playful visual survey of its thematic essays will cause board and table game aficionados to share in the revelry of togetherness.
Publishers Weekly
You won't find Monopoly or Scrabble here, but rather The Popular Game of Broadway and Soldier Ten Pins. But some of the other names will be familiar in this vividly illustrated collection of late 19th-century and early 20th-century games in the collection of the New-York Historical Society: Milton Bradley (producer of, among others, Anagrams and Other Letter Games) and Parker Brothers (who produced What's His Name, a quiz game about famous men). This fascinating look at games past is not all play: Jackson, president of the Historical Society and a historian at Columbia, posits that games reflect the social concerns of their times, and illuminating captions offer bite-size lessons in social history. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.