Trick-taking

• The Oxford Guide to Card Games by David Parlett
  Oxford, 361 pp, £15.00, October 1990, ISBN 0 19 214165 1

Excitement was aroused by the announcement, last September, of a double discovery: the actual rules, on a cuneiform tablet, of a board game thought to date from 3300 BC, of which only some surviving boards had previously been known, and a living individual from a Jewish community in Cochin who had herself played that very game before she migrated to Israel, and could recall the rules in accordance with which she had then played it. Academics gathered at the British Museum to confer about board games of the ancient world.