Disorganized and surprisingly badly designed.
1 star
There's nothing wrong with a book of public domain games, but this is not a good one. The pages dedicated to matchstick games are blue with black text, making them almost entirely illegible unless you're under great light. (I find this amazing, given that Pentagram is a "design consultancy with an international reputation in graphics, architecture and product design" according to the credits.) The string figures include a nice diagram of the end result but no step-by-step diagrams, only a long paragraph of text ("Take the near string and wind it around the left index finger and and thumb in a figure-of-eight, thus; back between them, round the index figure, back between them and around the thumb...") which I doubt anyone could be expected to follow. There is no organization of games into chapters by type -- the solitaire games, hopscotch games, string figures, board games, etc, are all shuffled …
There's nothing wrong with a book of public domain games, but this is not a good one. The pages dedicated to matchstick games are blue with black text, making them almost entirely illegible unless you're under great light. (I find this amazing, given that Pentagram is a "design consultancy with an international reputation in graphics, architecture and product design" according to the credits.) The string figures include a nice diagram of the end result but no step-by-step diagrams, only a long paragraph of text ("Take the near string and wind it around the left index finger and and thumb in a figure-of-eight, thus; back between them, round the index figure, back between them and around the thumb...") which I doubt anyone could be expected to follow. There is no organization of games into chapters by type -- the solitaire games, hopscotch games, string figures, board games, etc, are all shuffled together. For example, a checkerboard appears on a page with a game you can play on it, and then, ten or eleven pages later, another checkerboard appears with a different game. I counted nine checkerboard games and they are interspersed throughout the 166 pages quite randomly. There is no table of contents and no index. I picked it up for 75¢ at a Friends of the Library sale, and I'm going to donate it back. I really don't understand how this thing kept getting published through so many editions over the years. Get the excellent Sid Sackson board game book from Klutz Press or Eddie Bauer instead.