A civil engineer graduate, he participated in projects such as the Yorktown aircraft carrier sunk by a Japanese submarine in 1942, the battleship Missouri where the surrender of Japan was signed that ended World War II in 1945 and the construction of the World Trade Center towers. in 1973. He married Bernice Pearl Berdick, in 1941, with whom he would live the rest of his life in the Bronx in New York, sharing the hobby of board games and getting to have the largest private collection in the world with around 18,000 board games.
In turn, he designed more than 500 games that were known through magazines, newspaper columns and books until, in 1962, he published his first board game commercially: High Spirits. It lasted very little in the market and, according to Sackson himself, it was ruined by the publisher by transforming it into a mediocre children’s game. Later, with his friend Alex Randolph, began creating board games for the 3M brand.
One of the most famous and innovative was Acquire (1964), a game where each player invests strategically, in hotel businesses, trying to obtain the maximum profits. As hotels grow with the placement of pieces, they also begin to merge, giving majority shareholders considerable bonuses, which can be used to reinvest in other chains.
The style of play of Acquire had a great impact on the designs of Europe being the seed for the emergence of the genre called Eurogames or German-style games, a country that was beginning to be the mecca of modern board games. As Steward Woods argues, in essence, Acquire it had most of the characteristics that would later come to typify the Eurogame: an emphasis on the abstract system on the subject, a relatively short and clear set of rules, a limited playing time, and no elimination of players.
In the 1960s, Sackson collaborated with the popularizer and philosopher of science Martin Gardner, in his column on mathematical games, in Scientific American. Later he left engineering to dedicate himself exclusively to the creation of games and published, commercially, Focus (1981), a game that had been described in 1963 in the aforementioned magazine.
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For its depth, Focus it is within the tradition of strategy games such as chess or checkers and where Sackson himself appropriated the materials of these traditional games to define new battles on an old 64-square battlefield. This game won the Spiel des Jahres award for best game of the year in 1981 in Germany.
Among other fundamental games, of the 50 that were marketed by Sackson, we find Can´t stop or stop (1980) where he devised an interesting way to use the probabilities of two dice and later I am the boss (1994), a game to lose friends while we carry out the most ruthless negotiations. In Argentina, many of his games were published without mentioning his name, a paradox of fate for those who had contributed so much in favor of the idea that the author of a board game deserved equal recognition as the author of a literary work.
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In 2007, the Catalan and playful popularizer, Oriol Comas and Coma directed a collection of books on games where he published, in Spanish, Lots of games (RBA, 2007), a compilation that Sackson had made around 1969 where he described novel card, board and party games created by himself and by the most varied characters: a Polish film critic, a Benedictine monk, two weavers of baskets, etc. This book can still be found in some thrift stores.
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Sid Sackson he had a dream that his huge collection, which occupied every inch of his house from floor to ceiling, would be housed in some American university or some German museum, and that he would be its curator for life. In the 1990s, his health deteriorated, a victim of Alzheimer’s, ruining his sleep as well as his collection, which was sold to meet medical expenses and finally disposed of in a rushed and chaotic auction shortly after his death. in 2002.
His name immediately became a gaming legend and icon of the board game industry in the second half of the 20th century.
In 2007, the Sackson family relinquished The Strong National Museum of Play, more than 300 game prototypes and personal diaries from Sid Sackson that today present us the draft soul of this great designer whose games and novel mechanics are essential to understand the explosion of Eurogames such as The settlers of Catan (1995) during the 1990s and around the same time as the rise of video games. The story of Sid Sackson and his legacy are still alive and still illuminate numerous proposals for modern board games where the ingenuity, subtlety and elegance of this passionate designer beats.
Link to access the Sackson web portal: https://sacksonportal.museumofplay.org/s/sackson-portal/page/welcome
Professor of Philosophy and Computer Engineer. Professor in the Chair of Medieval Philosophy at the National University of Mar del Plata. Author of the board game Who wants to be president? (2020).
