Hobby Games: The 100 Best back in print

Hobby_games: 100 Best is coming back in print.

I know this should be under press releases or news but I'm heading to Conncon to get drunk and play Ti3 and Here I Stand and I didn't have time for that kind of BS. KingPut

In Hobby Games: The 100 Best, the top designers, authors, and publishers in the hobby games field write about the most enjoyable and cleverly designed games of the last fifty years. Their essays cover the gamut of the hobby market, from roleplaying games to collectible card games, and miniatures games to wargames to board games, with titles both familiar and esoteric. These are the games that the designers themselves play, the ones that have inspired their most popular creations.

Writers include such legendary designers as Gary Gygax (co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons), Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (co-founders of Games Workshop), Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering), and Larry Harris (creator of Axis and Allies); best-selling authors R. A. Salvatore, Tracy Hickman, Douglas Niles, and Ed Greenwood; computer industry notables Warren Spector (Deus Ex), Bruce Shelley (Age of Empires), Jack Emmert (City of Heroes), and Bruce Nesmith (Oblivion); as well as dozens of other prominent and award-winning creators, including Richard Berg, Monte Cook, Zeb Cook, Greg Costikyan, Bruno Faidutti, Jeff Grubb, Steve Jackson (US), Tom Jolly, Marc W. Miller, Alan R. Moon, Christian T. Petersen, Sandy Petersen, Mike Pondsmith, Ted Raicer, Greg Stafford, S. Craig Taylor, Martin Wallace, James M. Ward, Jordan Weisman, Stewart Wieck, and Teeuwynn Woodruff. Also, Zev wrote about Twilight Struggles.

Hobby Games: The 100 Best also features a foreword by board game legend Reiner Knizia and an afterword by SPI founder and wargame legend James F. Dunnigan.

Sounds great. Anyone here read it? Worth a buy?

I have considered getting this, I like to read the ocasional book about gaming but most are terrible beyond belief so I don't. Should I?

I read it and it was quite good. Each author got to choose the game they wrote on and each wrote their own essay independently. So the quality from one to the next varies. But some of the writing was very good, and the part that struck me the most was how many wrote from the historical perspective -- looking at the game in situ which is not only much fairer, but gives insight into the state of the hobby at the time. That is likely the biggest take-away from reading it, the broader view it gives of how the state of the art has progressed.

S.

And dozens of price-gougers, from Amazon to eBay, just went, "D'oh!" Seriously, it's a fine book — but not worth $100.

The sequel — Family Games — is also quite good.

The Kindle edition is $10, text-to-speech enabled and lending enabled. Anyone paying $100 for this needs their head examined.

S.

I sold mine to a lurker here last year.

It's mainly good because of a handful of very good entries, but it tempted me into buying things I really didn't need to. I liked the Family Games book even better, honestly; Richard Garfield on Scrabble??!? Peter Olotka on Risk!

I wanted it to be better than it was, though; I wanted WAY more either a) personal stories about the game or b) insight into the game's design that only a game designer would notice. Instead, the majority of the articles are mostly summaries of the game's mechanics. The Family Games book skews more toward what I wanted.

Yeah, I wasn't complaining: I sold mine, used, for something like 2.5 times cover price right after it first went out of print (which, for most people, means, "Goddamnit, Amazon isn't stocking this!").

Also, definite agreement with the sentiment that the second book is actually a bit better.

I gave mine to a charity shop. It's was a decent-ish read but I don't recall it being particularly memorable. Probably skipped a lot of it too.

Surprised that it was sought after.