Great Sites for Researching Games

Also see Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks on this site.

See also Books on Games on this site.

Associations and Groups

• The Association for Games & Puzzles International (AGPI)
• European Society of Game-Collectors / Europäische Spielesammler Gilde e. V. (ESG)
• International Society for Board Game Studies (BGS)
• The Games Board
• Games Cultures Society
• Game Science Research Center (Game.Sci.Re.Center) • YouTube

Game Databases, Wikis, Sites, etc.

• GameCatalog.org — this site!
• BoardGameGeek with gamer feedback ➤ (note that certain other sites use the BGG API to deliver the same content)
• The Big Game Hunter from Bruce Whitehill
• The Games Board and its GARD database, with a predominant focus on British games from the Victorian and Edwardian eras (1750-1910)
• Traditional Games from James Masters
• Luding (in both German and English)
• LastDodo — with over 13,000 games, based in the Netherlands (in English, Dutch, French, and German) ➤ since July 2020; Catawiki was a predecessor
• Spiele-Check (in German)
• Historisch Overzicht Nederlandse GezelschapsSpellen (HONGS – Historical Overview of Dutch Games) ➤ offline as of October 2019; incorporated into Luding as of May 2021.
• vzw Vlaams Spellenarchief (in Dutch)
• Ken Tidwell’s Game Cabinet
• Wikipedia’s List of game manufacturers
• Bradspel (in Swedish)
• La Tana dei Goblin (in Italian)
• JeuxSoc from François Haffner (in French)

Sites About One Publisher

• 3M Games by Larry Arrigoni
• Avalon Hill from Grognard
• Ed-U-Cards Manufacturing by Donald Dell Milne at Roadtrip – ’62
• Hasbro history on their site
• John Jaques & Son, London
• Mattel history on their site
• McLoughlin Bros. at the American Antiquarian Society
• Parker Brothers, by George Swinnerton Parker
• Spear’s Games Archive (archived)
• Spear Games in the German Games Archive, Nuremberg Municipal Museums, at Google Arts and Culture

Sites About One Game

• Backgammon craze in the U.S. starting in the 1930s, by Albert Steg at the New England Backgammon Club
• Camelot, by Parker Brothers, from the World Camelot Federation and Michael Wortley Nolan (now operated by Dave Thomen)
• Checkers, from the Online Museum of Checkers History, edited by Jay Hinnershitz, Liam Stephens, and Ken Lovell
• Landlord’s Game and Monopoly by Thomas Forsyth
• Monopoly, at Wikia
• Rook Cards by Coit Morrison
• Scrabble, by Selchow & Righter, from Donald Sauter
• Subbuteo by Peter Upton
• Table Tennis from the International Table Tennis Federation
• Tiddlywinks from Rick Tucker
• Uno from Workavator and in the National Toy Hall of Fame

Sites About a Topic or Theme or Category of Games

• Abstract Strategy Games
• Alice in Wonderland games from Rob Stone
• Automobile games from Pagerolau in France (and Google translation to English)
• Bagatelle from James Masters
• Baseball Games website and online forums from Butch,  Kerm, and Win
  • Baseball Games by McLoughlin Bros.
  • Ethan Allen, Cadaco-Ellis, and All-Star Baseball
  • Jim Prentice Electric Baseball
  • Manage Your Own Team Baseball Card Games by Warren Paper Products
  • Cadaco All-Star Baseball
• Bookie and bookmaking games
• Cycling board games from Anki Toner
• (International) Football board games by Paul Woolzey
• Giochi dell’Oca e di percorso (Goose and route games) by Luigi Ciompi & Adrian Seville (in Italian and English)
• Horseracing games
• Letter-by letter word games, originally compiled by Steffan O’Sullivan and now maintained by Graham Toal
• Pinball games at the Internet Pinball Database
• Playing cards and card games
  • World of Playing Cards
  • English Playing Card Society
  • International Playing Card Society
  • World Web Playing Card Museum
• Political games by Tony Nardo, plus an archived site
• Positional games by James J. Bond
• Space games (French) (plus Google’s translation into English)
• War games by David Stewart-Patterson
• War games from Grognard
• War games (naval) in the U.S. Navy Department Library

Sites About Specific Game Pieces

• Dice by Kevin Cook
• Teetotums by Geri Walton

Trade Catalogs

• McLoughlin Brothers catalogs at the American Antiquarian Society
• Trade catalogs at The Strong Museum of Play
• Trade catalogs from the Antique Toy Collectors of America
• Early McLoughlin Bros. catalogs at Princeton’s Cotsen Library
• Trade catalogs at Old Wood Toys, from 1918 to the 1950s
• Trade catalogs at the Parry Game Preserve, mostly from the 1980s and later

In addition, numerous George S. Parker and Parker Brothers catalogs from 1888 through the 1990s plus a few Milton Bradley, McLoughlin Bros., Selchow & Righter trade catalogs have been scanned by the AGPI but are not yet online. Contact us for further information.

Museums and Archives

Belgium

• vzw Vlaams Spellenarchief, Brugge, Belgium

Canada

• Elliott Avedon Virtual Museum Games, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Germany

• Deutches Spiele Archiv (German Game Archive), Marburg/Lahn, Germany
• Deutsches Spiele Archiv (German Game Archive), at Google Arts and Culture
• Nuremberg Toy Museum (in English)/ Speilzeugmuseum, Museen der Stadt Nürnberg (in German), Nuremberg, Germany

Switzerland

• Le Musée Suisse du Jeu, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland

United Kingdom

• Young V&A (formerly the V&A Museum of Childhood, and before that, the Bethnal Green Museum), London, England
• Spear’s Games Archives, England (archived)

United States

• The Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York
• The Strong National Museum of Play, at Google Arts & Culture
• The Liman Collection, New-York Historical Society, New York, New York
• National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
• The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana