The Sackson Auction

Sid Sackson is arguably the premier American game designer. His designs include Acquire, Can’t Stop, and SdJ winner Focus. He also wrote a number of books including the classic Gamut of Games.

After he died in 2002 his family auctioned off his collection of over 18,000 games. While Sackson lived in New York, his surviving family was in New Jersey, so the auction was held less than an hour from my house.

Sid Sackson showing off part of his collection

I was privileged to be able to attend both, first in November 2002 and then May 2003.

When I got to the auction house that November it was overwhelming. I have never seen that many games in one place at one time – and it was only half the collection! The place that was holding the auction usually handled antiques, and it was obvious that they had no idea about what was valuable and what wasn't. They had pulled out what they considered to be the 'collectible' games onto a separate table to sell individually – but it was mainly games based on TV shows and movies (Hey! It's the Welcome Back Kotter game! Someone will pay top dollar for that!). Meanwhile they were selling giant SPI war games like War In The Pacific, War In Europe, Wacht Am Rhein, and more in a single lot.

Welcome Back Kotter sold for $1.50. The SPI pack went for well over $500 - which was probably a good deal at the time.

Lots of luminaries were there, including Steve Jackson, Will Shortz, and Erik Arneson.

Most of the games were in hundreds of numbered cardboard boxes scattered around the room, on top of and under tables, each with around ten games, totally unrelated. Each box was to be auctioned off as a lot. I unfortunately got there just an hour before the auction and didn't have much time to go through and evaluate each box, but I did the best I could. There was no catalog. It was chaos.

But it was also like a treasure hunt. You could go through a box and find an absolute gem shoved in the middle of a bunch of dreck.

At one point I pulled out a box that was behind two other boxes under a table, crawling on the floor to get to it. I pulled it out and, spied a copy of Cosmic Encounter at the very bottom – the original Eon version. I unloaded the whole box to get to it, and opened it up to check out the contents. Not only was it mint, but there was a letter on top, opened, but still in the envelope. Here's an image:

What a find! I immediately put it back together, put it back at the bottom of the box, under the table, behind a few other boxes, and noted the box number.

Unfortunately, someone else had opened it as well, and the box ended up going for a lot - well above my price range.

Much to everyone's dismay, about a half an hour into the auction the auctioneers realized there was no way they were going to get through everything at the rate they were going. So they started auctioning off five cartons at a time – which really threw everyone into a tizzy since most, like me, had just recorded what boxes they were interested in and what they had. All of a sudden there were a ton of other games in the lot but you had no way of evaluating the true value.

As you can imagine, a crowd of gamers will not be happy with a change in the rules!

But we muddled through. I didn't get much at the first auction, as the prices were mostly out of my league. By the second auction, though, many fewer people attended, and the prices were much more reasonable. My family bought so many games (mainly due to extras in the box lot that we really didn't want) that we had a hard time getting them all into the minivan!

But the one I really wanted – an official Sid Sackson-owned copy of Can't Stop eluded me. Fortunately Erik Arneson had bought a lot of several, and graciously sold us one of his copies.

I did get some good games, including Ave Caeser, Big Boss, McMulti, and more. In retrospect I wish I had bought more, but with the way the box lots were perhaps I ended up with enough crap games as it was. In fact, if anyone wants an official Sackson-owned game (with the official Sid Sackson stamp on the inside) let me know and we'll try to work something out.

The Rest of the Story

This copy of Cosmic Encounter - with the letter still included - was put up for auction as an item in the 2013 Jack Vasel Memorial Fund charity auction by the person who originally purchased it at the Sackson auction - Christopher Weeks.

Now that it was a decade later I was in a different financial position, and this time I won the auction.

At the 2019 Tabletop Network Conference we awarded Peter Olotka, one of the designers of Cosmic Encounter, with the Gaming Pioneer award, for his outstanding contributions to the hobby. In addition to the landmark Cosmic Encounter, he also designed the original Dune game (still a legend), and Hoax, perhaps the original social deduction game, and a clear precursor of Coup, decades prior.

I brought Sid Sackson’s Cosmic Encounter to the conference and shared it with him. He was overwhelmed with emotion, and was so moved to see that letter, which he clearly remembered them sending. It was an amazing moment to be able to share.

Losing History

In the latter years of his life, Sid Sackson tried to donate his collection to various museums, and sadly was rebuffed. So it ended up scattered to the winds, along with many notes and prototypes. Even in the small subset of his games I was able to purchase there I randomly discovered prototype rules (in German) from Wolfang Kramer for what was ultimately published as Big Boss, although he called it Big Mac.

I scanned and posted those rules to Board Game Geek so that they wouldn’t be lost. But I’m sure that countless others were.

At GDC a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting with Henry Lowell of Stanford Libraries. He and many others have been leading the charge to preserving video games, which have their own set of preservation issues, such as lost hardware to run them on. But now he and others want to turn their attention to preserving the history of tabletop games, through archives, oral history, and more.

The Strong Museum of Play has been a leader in archiving and cataloging game materials. If they had been around when Sackson was looking for a home for his collection the result would have been different.

However, even so, they are doing great work to keep Sackson’s dreams alive. You can view the Sackson Portal, which collects all of his diaries and design notes, and is an open public project to help transcribe them.

I hope that the Tabletop Game Designers Association can also be a part of this effort to preserve the history of game designs. We encourage designers to preserve their notes and prototypes, and share them. We look forward to working with the Strong, Stanford, and others that are scrambling to preserve this cultural legacy.