Making Mechanical Toys Book

The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games is more of an art book or coffee table book than pure history book. Margaret A. Hofer is an art historian/museum curator more than a game historian and it shows in some of the descriptions of the elaborate color plates in this book. Those elaborate color plates are beautiful photographs of 19th century board games and, outside of the short introduction and seven brief introductions for various game themes, the text consists of brief to paragraph-long captions describing the images in the photographs. I speak of the game themes (parlor amusements (not necessarily games, per se), educational games (a mix of card games, panoramas, puzzles, and race games), moral and materialistic games (mostly race games, but including some economic strategy), war games (race games, quiz games, table-top "bowling" games with military figures, and a couple of strategy games with no rules that are not immediately obvious), parlor athletics (race games and dexterity games using athletic themes), urban games (race games, story games (using card decks), and a couple of economic games), and travel games (almost all race games).

Immediately useful for my purposes was the beautiful reproduction of the race game built on John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (no real strategy, but visually appealing enough that I used it in a recent sermon illustration), the images of Parker Brothers' original Pit compared with images from its competitive set, Commerce, games inspired by the Spanish-American War (since we cover this era in the class, I'll want to show the box covers or boards for Uncle Sam at War with Spain, Schley at Santiago Bay, Roosevelt at San Juan, and Rough Rider Ten Pins), and race games similar to the ancient ones like The Post Office Game (using its map of downtown Manhattan), The Game of Phoebe Snow (wonder if McLoughlin Brothers actually licensed the character from the Lackawanna Railroad advertisements of the time for this game), Jerome Park Steeple Chase and Yacht Race.

The only negative to the book is that, perhaps because it is written by a curator rather than a gamer, there are a couple of captions that do not make sense. For example, there is a game called War at Sea or Don't Give Up the Ship. The game box has a warship from the era of the Spanish-American War. The goal of the game is to sweep the enemy's fleet from the Caribbean and Atlantic Seaboard. Although the phrase, "Don't Give Up the Ship" dates to the War of 1812, the box cover (as noted earlier) reflects the Spanish-American War. So, the text claims that the game as well as the box was changed to the more recent conflict (p. 94). Yet, the game board pictured alongside the caption is marked with British forts and ports from the War of 1812 rather than with Spanish flags (p. 95). It would appear, at least to this observer, that only the box was changed to pull in patriotic young men through disingenuous marketing. Of course, since the author is not a gamer, there are rarely any rules summaries or descriptions of play to go with the elaborate illustrations.

Still, this is a beautiful book to peruse and it provides a launching pad for further research. It offers occasional jewels of information and deserves a place on every game historian's (academic, amateur, or professional) desk. Some of the classics can be recreated merely from the images provided and some of the classics beg for further investigation. Although Ms. Hofer left me wishing for more information, I am thankful for this delightful introduction to games more readily experienced on the east coast of the U.S. than near my west coast roots.