Sidney (Sid) Sackson was born in Chicago IL in 1920 and died on 6 November 2002 at 82, 10 days before his collection of board games, a collection that was ostensibly the world’s largest, was to be auctioned off.

Mr. Sackson’s collection was never catalogued, but he estimated that it contained more than 10,000 and less than 20,000 games, all of which were stored in and around his house. His dream was to have the games in a museum, of which he would be curator, or failing that, to have them all acquired privately.

He wrote A Gamut of Games before retiring from Civil Engineering. In 1970 he began working at home as a full time game inventor, collector and author, and wrote six more game books.

Mr. Sackson’s collection included board games and board wargames, as well as masses of ephemera: prototypes of unpublished and published games; various components of incomplete games (in the beginning, he did not keep the game boxes, in an effort to reduce the mass of his collection); magazines and books; catalogues; and correspondence.

When Mr. Sackson’s health began to fail, his family decided to dispose of his game collection to help pay for the medical bills. They tried to find a single person or institution that would take the entire collection, but failing that, they chose to auction off the collection.

The auction consisted of four phases: the first was a book auction; the second was a box lot auction; the third was an auction of individual games, primarily old games aimed at the antique collector; and finally, the auction of groups of games, mostly in shrink-wrap, consisting of wargames and Eurostyle boardgames.

The auctioneers admitted that they did not know what they had on their hands, and this was evident from the way they grouped games into box lots, and auctioned off two or three box lots at a time. They put together a partial list of lots, but with so many games, they claimed that they couldn’t list them all in the time available. Details were not made available, but there were about 330 box lots and about 120 individual games.

There was some confusion over the prototypes. Initially the auctioneers included many of them in the box lots, but later, it appeared as though the family wanted them back, and some effort was made to do so. However, after the auction, the family reconsidered and let the buyers keep what they had bought.

At the age of eight, Mr. Sackson invented a pencil and paper game that eventually became Acquire. As a teenager, he won awards for his ballroom dancing. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from New York’s City College with a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and was offered a graduate fellowship. In the 1960’s, 3M published a series of games including Mr. Sackson’s Acquire, Bazaar, Monad, Venture, Sleuth and Executive Decision.

Sadly, we have lost not only a pre-eminent game designer and expert, but we have also lost the irreplaceable treasure that was his game collection. Now that it has been scattered like the ashes of the dead, any hope of being able to catalog it, and create the basis of an accurate and definitive ludography, is equally dead. The auction was held, and a life’s work was undone, in what is suspiciously like indecent haste.

Mr. Sackson was not as well known by board wargamers as he was by the general boardgaming community. This shouldn’t be surprising, as Mr. Sackson was not a specialist ... he was a board gamer pure and simple, and recognized wargames as being one small segment of the boardgaming field.

In his Games column in S&T 21, Mr. Sackson reprinted The New Game of Invasion by Lt. Henry Chamberlain, R.N. from a book published by F.H. Ayres in London in 1889. Interestingly, in Lou Zocchi’s otherwise excellent compendium of SPI games, he erroneously gives Mr. Sackson credit for designing this game.

In his own first book, A Gamut of Games published in 1969, Mr. Sackson included Origins of World War I by James Dunnigan. I have followed precedent by reprinting this game on the following pages.