Nina Chertoff

Although well illustrated with large color photographs of the game boards and pieces, the few words of explanation on each page are essentially worthless. If researched fully and expanded, this could have been a really interesting volume for collectors.

This is basically a picture book; it's got pictures of various games, usually given one page, but sometimes a two-page spread, with a couple sentences on each giving some rudimentary information on the game. There's no analysis or explanation, no index or table of contents. It's basically a tiny coffee-table book.

Even accepting its limited goal, it's still a frustrating volume. The dustjacket's claim to trace the history is incorrect; there's no order to the items in the book, there's few show more connections between the items in descriptions, nor any evidence that they were chosen because of any particular importance. It would have been a lot stronger book without major changes, if the games had been sorted into sections and some text used to showing the patterns. show less