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Since it's been 30 years since I have played any kind of cards, I got this to have if and when necessary. I bought it as a replacement for the one my son took with him when he moved out to MD.
I would highly recommend this item. This book will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the rules of many, many games. As always, "Hoyle's Rules of Games" is a great product for learning how to play a variety of card games, dice, etc. We owned one that was very old and needed to be replaced, as it was falling apart.
I would do business with this seller again. Book ordered was received in fine condition, in a very short time.
Easy to find out who's right. Very good reference for when you play with friends and they have different rules than Hoyle. A treasure. Wow, we just learned that we've been playing War wrong all these years. You'd be amazed at how you forget the rules to the games you knew as a kid.
There is one and only one reason I am giving this book three stars: if someone needs to settle a dispute about a game rule, this is likely to be the book someone goes looking for. Or Samegame. Yes, vocabulary is cleaned up (Charades is no longer known by the pretentious "The Game", which is now generally understood to refer to either a professional wrestler, a rapper, or an extremely tiresome 4chan meme). (But not Tetris.
(Meanwhile, the arcane and somewhat sadistic trivia game Botticelli remains intact).A serious gamer will need this book, but Philip Morehead really did a piss-poor job of updating his father's work. Or Frozen Bubble/Snood). Board game coverage is abysmal -- where's Mancala, or Pachisi, or Chinese Checkers, or Snakes and Ladders, or Go, or Xiangqi, for that matter even Monopoly or Risk (since Morehead, Morehead, and Mott-Smith do include Scrabble and Battleship). Granted a 4th edition that was actually worth buying would be well over a hundred pages longer, but one would hope that Morehead could live up to the standard of someone like David Parlett. Dice and dominoes only get minimal coverage; tile games like Mahjongg get none at all, and not even a token effort is made at recognizing the wide swath of strategy and role-playing games out there. If it wasn't for that, it wouldn't be worth buying at all.Morehead and Mott-Smith's book may have been perfectly adequate when it was printed, but Morehead's son Philip really hasn't done more than a superficial job of updating it.
But the card game section is embarrassingly traditional -- not a single Spanish-deck game, for example, despite the United States' large quantity of Hispanic citizens and immigrants, and few games popular in other countries like Tarot, Brag, or el Mus. Get the best deal on this one you can find, but don't tie yourself to it. A few things are added here and there -- Freecell, for example, and oddly Minesweeper make up a scant section on computer games. Or Bejeweled.
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