The best games from Sid Sackson 🇺🇸👨 2025

Can't Stop is a classic dice game designed by Sid Sackson, renowned for its blend of luck, risk-taking, and tactical decision-making. It's a game that challenges players to wisely balance their boldness and caution as they aim to complete columns on the game board.

In Acquire, players strategically invest in businesses, aiming to secure a majority of stock. As tile placements drive business growth and mergers, majority stockholders receive significant bonuses. These bonuses can be reinvested into other chains, creating a race among players to accumulate the greatest wealth.

Elevenses for One includes two solitaire games that were previously released separately. Players must load their tea cart with all the necessary items for a delightful morning tea before the clock strikes 11. The game consists of eleven cards, each with specific actions to choose from, aiming to load the cart correctly within fifteen moves. Bowling Solitaire simulates a bowling round using standard playing cards.

I'm the Boss! is a dynamic negotiation board game where players embody investors wheeling and dealing to close lucrative deals. With its blend of strategy, negotiation, and chance, the game captures the cutthroat world of business in a fun and engaging way.

This book offers rules for 38 games that can be played with common gaming equipment such as cards, dice, a checkers set, pen, and paper. The games cover a variety of themes, player counts (solo, two players, or more), and skill levels, including strategy, luck, and logic games.

A series of small dice games has been launched, each packaged in a container that doubles as a miniature dice tower. Extra!, based on a game first presented as Solitaire Dice in Sid Sackson's book A Gamut of Games, allows players to roll five dice simultaneously.

Luck and strategy are both important in the game. The board is filled with 36 colored marbles in random distribution. Players take turns picking marbles and aiming to collect color sets for higher points. Each player moves an arrow at the edge of the board to select marbles from the intersection of their arrows. The game board can be easily reset for new rounds.

Can't Stop Express is a reimplementation of the game Choice/Einstein, which itself is based on Solitaire Dice first published in 1969. To win, players need courage to take risks along with the ability to predict and plan. After each roll of the five dice, players choose the best combination of two pairs while making a good choice for the fifth die, earning points to compete for victory. The game includes solitaire rules as well.

Sleuth is a riveting deduction game from the acclaimed designer Sid Sackson, originally part of the 3M Gamette Series. This game puts players in the shoes of detectives on the hunt for a single, hidden gem among 36 possibilities. The game cleverly distributes partial information at the start, leaving players with the task of piecing together what they know, what they learn, and what they can deduce about the missing gem through clever questioning and keen observation.

A clear rulebook provides instructions for 15 timeless classics in board game history. Players can enjoy games like Backgammon, Go, and Mancala. Other options include Hoppers, Hex, and 3-D Tic Tac Toe.

The game includes a lot of small chips in five colors. At the start, two equation cards are randomly drawn, each containing five equations that define color equivalences. Players reveal four goal cards, each showing a combination of five chips they aim to collect, and they can roll a colored die or exchange chips based on the equations to achieve the right combinations while minimizing leftover chips for points.

BuyWord is a word game with a twist. Players spend real money to purchase letters and then form a word to sell for profit, with payouts based on the quantity and quality of the letters used. It combines basic math, money management, and classic word formation in an engaging way that keeps all players involved until the end of each turn.

Players take on the role of gold miners, moving through a vault filled with gold bars. They roll dice to collect bars marked with numbers, aiming for the higher-numbered bars that are harder to reach. Players can continue collecting gold on their turn until they either fail a die roll or decide they have enough for that turn.

Players engage in a trading game where they do not trade with each other. Instead, goods are displayed in a series of "nomad camps" on the board. When landing on a camp, players must offer a gift to exchange their cards for those available there. Players can also purchase goods from the deck on the "oasis spots." Collecting a certain quantity of a good allows players to head to town to sell it. The game continues until someone reaches 500 cash to win. It’s an entertaining family game that doesn’t require complex strategies.

Players compete to assemble sets of colored cards by drawing from several communal piles. Depending on the symbol on a card, drawing it might allow you to take another card from the piles or even steal cards of the same color from your opponents. At the end of the round, the players with the majority in each color score points, with point values varying from round to round.

Players purchase companies with sets of resource cards that have different monetary values. Submitting a set of matching symbols earns more than their face value, making set collection a key strategy. Purchased companies are arranged based on matching letters, and the top company in each stack is vulnerable to takeover attempts by other players. Scoring occurs whenever a player draws a victory card, and the game ends when the company stack is depleted.

The aim of the game is to collect round cards known as "Monads," resembling Yin-Yang symbols. Players achieve this by trading, purchasing, and jumping with other cards.

The objective is to catch as many opponent's fish as possible. Players can swap the positions of their octopus and shark with other fish of their color before the first turn, but cannot place them adjacent to an opponent's octopus or shark. Players can only move horizontally or vertically, capturing opponent's fish of equal or lesser value, and the game ends when a player reaches 60 points or catches all opponent's fish in a single round.

Players engage in negotiations to amass more money than their opponents. The game is played in rounds, with each round involving a separate distribution of money. Players take turns playing cards that grant them a share in the current deal, and after a set number of deals, the player with the most money wins.

The book features six cooperative games: Space Exploration, Resources, Rescue, Peace Conference, Search, and Round 'n' Round. It is part of a series of five paper-and-pencil game books by Sid Sackson, which includes titles like "Beyond Competition" and "Games of Art."

The published version of Sackson's domino pearl game is described in A Gamut of Games. It is a domino-like placement game that rewards the proper arrangement of patterns.

Fokus (or Domination) is an abstract strategy game where players aim to move pieces and capture them, leaving their opponents with no available moves. A player can move one piece or a stack of pieces based on their quantity, and if a stack exceeds five pieces, excess pieces are removed. Strategically reserving captured pieces for later use can turn the tide of the game by enabling powerful plays against opponents.

Players attempt to construct the best buildings in a rapidly growing city. The game board consists of city blocks divided into smaller lots. In each turn, players select a lot and negotiate the placement of a new structure, while the value of each building is influenced by the types of buildings within the same block.

Many people are familiar with a handful of classic card games, but the book by Sid Sackson presents a wealth of card games that most have never imagined. It includes fascinating, exotic, and downright funny games from across Asia, Europe, and Latin America. With over 60 games varying in difficulty from easy to hard, it can entertain two players or a full table, featuring everything from old American favorites to newly created diversions, including a soccer card game.

Players travel from city to city in a single car with the aim of reaching their destinations at specific times to maximize points. Control of the car is auctioned off each round, and the winner pays the bank and selects the car's destination.

Decide which finished goods to sell and how much based on your capital. Purchase the necessary raw materials and combine them into products for sale. Prices fluctuate according to supply and demand, requiring strategic bidding on both raw materials and finished products. The game is easy to learn but offers interesting strategies.

A commercial edition of Sid Sackson's game "Card Stock Market" can be played with two standard decks of cards. The game features thematic graphics to reduce its abstract nature and is based on the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. Players manage shares of four colored companies, buy and sell stocks, alter stock prices with their cards, and aim to end the game with the highest cash total after the market closes.

Contains six pencil-and-paper games designed for solo play, including Four Color, Pinball, Profit & Loss, Mountains & Valleys, No Way, and Buried Treasure (not to be confused with the later game of the same name by Sackson). This is part of a series of five pencil-and-paper game books by Sid Sackson, which also includes Beyond Competition, Beyond Solitaire, Games of Art, Beyond Words, and Calculate!

Includes six competitive paper-and-pencil word games by Sid Sackson, each named after an author inspired by the game's style: Tolstoy, Joyce, Dickens, Poe, Carroll, and O. Henry. It is part of a series of five books featuring paper-and-pencil games by Sackson.

Players aim to build the longest chain of towers and walls in their color. Ideally, these chains should reach all four sides of the playing area, but opponents' chains will inevitably block the way.