#sid sackson

Renegade to be the new home of Sid Sackson’s classic Acquire #boardgames #tabletopgames

Renegade Game Studios and Hasbro have expanded their partnership to make Renegade the new home for Acquire, Sid Sackson’s classic game of big-city real estate. A partnership was first announced in October 2022, with the announcement that Renegade would be taking over Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, Robo Rally, and Squad Leader. Renegade will be releasing a new version of Acquire in 2023. First…

Game in a Minute: Can't Stop

Looking for some fast, tense, pure push your luck gameplay?  Well, Can't Stop is more or less perfect.  Want to know more?  Check out this week's Game in a Minute!

Poke is a unique two-player game that combines the mechanics of a trick-taking game with that of poker. In the first part of the hand, players draw cards to make the strongest poker hand they can. In the second, they play those hands out in the style of a classic trick-taking game. Poke was created by the American game collector, inventor, and author Sid Sackson, perhaps best known for his classic board game Acquire. The rules of Poke were first published in Esquire magazine in 1946, and it was later included in Sackson's 1969 book A Gamut of Games.

Divide and Conquer is a simple game for two players. Much like Gops, the exact composition of each player's hand is known to both players, and all of the strategy comes from simply playing the right cards at the right time! As in Mate, the only element of luck is the cards the player is initially dealt, and this is canceled out by the players switching hands after playing through them. As a result, the game is one of the rare examples of a card game that is entirely based around strategic play.

Divide and Conquer was invented by Claude Soucie, a Canadian-born game designer with several published board games under his belt. Soucie was a longtime friend of renowned game inventor and author Sid Sackson; the latter published Divide and Conquer in his 1981 compendium Card Games Around the World.

Bazaar 

After the Sackson stream, we played a Sid Sackson game, Bazaar. I commented during the stream that Bazaar is probably one of the least interesting games to watch someone play since it’s primarily a game of mental math. You randomly get a couple large cards set out on the table that show you potential trade equations and you spend your turns attempting to buy cards using gemstones that are acquired either through trading or rolling a die. It’s a simple concept, but a complex game BECAUSE you want to be efficient when you buy a card. The fewer gems you have remaining in your possession after a 5 gem purchase, the better you score for that card.

So...the result is a lot of people staring at the table and their gems and trying to math out the best combination possible. Players who can see turns in advance and plan ahead will excel at this game.

First of all, this game came out in 1967. I can only think of four other games I’ve played that came from that decade, two of which were designed by Sid Sackson (and the third will be the next game I review). The most recent printing of this was in 2011, so that tells you that the design has a certain longevity to it to still feel relevant almost 50 years later. Does it feel modern? No, it definitely has a “classic” feel to it. For one thing, the scoring system is waaaaaaaay slow. It tells you to play to 50 points in a two player game. We played to 10 in our live play and felt like that was a good length. On the other hand, I do find this game kind of trains your brain to look for combinations that work for you in a given situation and as the game progresses it becomes easier to recognize things like “green gems can’t be cashed in for anything in this game” or “white with blue gives me red, red, yellow, yellow”.

Overall, I think this game is alright. It’s certainly challenging and dynamic because of the variables involved. There’s even a solo mode where you play against yourself and count how many turns it takes you to use just the equations to spend your exact gem count. The problem is that it appears to be marketed toward children (The Discovery Toys line) and this is NOT the kind of game most children would be pumped about playing. But it’s accessible and great for a group that likes mathy puzzles and I would play it every now and then.

5.5 out of 10.

I was asked to come by the Interactive Museum of Gaming and Puzzlery to come by and take part in their live Twitch feed that they’re starting up. Apparently the museum had just acquired a donation that included some small amount of game designer Sid Sackson’s collection. For those who don’t know, Sid Sackson was a designer who made games from the 60s-90s, best known for Acquire. I consider Sackson a designer before his time and I’m sure many modern games owe some amount of their success to Sackson paving the way for interesting design choices. When Sackson died in 2003, he had one of the larger personal game collections out there...and his family chose to sell it off piece by piece rather than keep it together. Many feel this was a poor decision, but even in 2003 games weren’t as big of a deal as they are now and I’m sure the idea of a Sackson Museum would have been a bit less than practical at the time. Anyway, we set up the Twitch feed and proceeded to go through this box of things that came from the office of Sid Sackson...and it was more interesting than I anticipated.