A Gamut of Games, written by
Sid Sackson and first published in 1969, contains rules for a large number of pencil-and-paper,
card, and
board games; many of the games in the book had never before been published. It is considered by many to be an essential text for anyone into
abstract strategy[?] games, and a number of the rules were later expanded into full-fledged published board games.
Some of the games which were later sold separately include Focus[?] and Property[?] (which later became the popular Acquire); Richard Abbott[?] expanded his game Crossings, published here, into the more-refined title Epaminondas. Many of the games covered in the book were creations of Sid Sackson himself, who was a prolific game designer.
The sections of the book and the games covered therein are as follows:
- In Search of Big and Little Game
- Mate[?], a card game by G. Capellen
- Blue and Gray[?], a board game by Henry Busch and Arthur Jaeger
- Le Truc[?], a revived French card game
- Plank[?], a serious revamp of the concepts in Tic-Tac-Toe
- Hekaton[?], a card game originally published along with "Yankee Notion Cards" from the 19th century
- Game Inventors Are People Too
- Lines of Action, a board game by Claude Soucie
- Cups[?], a mancala variant by Arthur and Wald Amberstone
- Crossings, a board game by Robert Abbot; later turned into Epaminondas by Abbot
- Lap[?], a complex progeny of Battleships by Lech Pijanowsky
- Three Musketeers, a board game by Haar Hoolim; notably, this game and the character in it was once used as the mascot for the Zillions of Games software product.
- Paks[?], a card game by Phil Laurence
- Skedoodle[?], a pencil-and-paper game by Father Daniel
- Knight Chase[?], a board game by Alex Randolph (inventor of games like TwixT)
- Origins of World War I[?], a historical pencil-and-paper game by James Dunnigan which teaches players history
- Those Protean Pieces of Pasteboard - All of the games in this section use a standard pack of cards.
- New Battles on an Old Battlefield - All of the games in this section use a checkerboard.
- Grab a Pencil - All of the games in this section are meant to be played with pencil and paper.
- A Miscellany of Games
A second edition of the book was published in 1982; Dover Publications[?] released an unabridged reprint, with an additional preface by Sackson, in 1992.
Sackson, Sid. A Gamut of Games. ISBN 0-486-27347-4