Welcome to The Sid Sackson Portal.

The Sid Sackson collection, held in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play at The Strong, is a compilation of diaries, correspondence, notes, game descriptions, and publications created or used by Sid Sackson during his lengthy career in the toy and game industry. Sackson meticulously documented his daily activities related to game design, development, and collecting in his diaries; he recorded details about the games he played and designed, people with whom he spoke or corresponded in the game industry, and the articles and books he read. Sackson also indexed many of the diaries, creating a high level of access rarely found in personal papers. These handwritten diaries represent a comprehensive picture of the American board game industry in the latter half of the 20th century.

The Sid Sackson Portal allows game enthusiasts and researchers alike to dive into 35 years of diaries created by legendary game designer Sid Sackson. Perhaps best known for the popular hotel chain game Acquire, Sackson designed more than 500 games during his lifetime—about 50 of which went into production and into the homes of millions of gamers around the world. In addition to these diaries are photographs of game prototypes and published games created by Sid Sackson, which are housed in the artifact collections at The Strong National Museum of Play.

You can view full PDFs of each year's diary or Browse the Collection to keyword search (file titles or transcriptions) or to view individual page image files. Photographs of game prototypes and published games created by Sackson can be seen in this item set. (If an image doesn't seem to be loading, try refreshing your browser.)

Through crowdsourcing, we plan to make the transcriptions of Sid Sackson's diary pages available. Five diary projects will be open to transcription at any given time. See The Transcription Project to learn more.

As entire diaries are transcribed, reviewed, and approved, we will indicate here the years which have been completed. (So far, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970 been fully transcribed!)