Description

From the box cover:

"The Newest and Greatest Creation in Board Games"

40 new and different games of skill for children and adults.

Created by John Scarne, World's Foremost Game Authority.

From the rule book:

A NEW ERA IN BOARD GAMES

40 New and Different Skill Games

After a lifetime of experiment, John Scarne, the world's foremost game authority, proudly presents SCARNEY, the game board that was purposely designed not alone as a pastime for adults but as an educational aid and recreational activity for children.

The SCARNEY Game Board is without a doubt the greatest creation in amusement games since the invention of playing cards back in the eleventh century.

There are more than 40 new and sensational skill games that may be played on the SCARNEY Game Board -- each a different game in itself and each possessing its own ingenious point scoring system for a single game or match.

Exciting, easy to learn games for one to six players, individually or in partnership style. Includes SCARNEY, a skill game based on an entirely new game principle known as The Kaleidoscopic Principle; HIGH-LOW SCARNEY, the world's quickest ending skill game; SCARNEY CHECKERS, a checker style game wiht a Gin Rummy scoring; SCARNEY CHALLENGE, an unequaled point scoring track game; SOLITAIRE SCARNEY and MOKO SOLITAIRE, the two greatest all-skill solitaire board games ever invented. The perfect diversion for home and club.

* * *

The board consists of a 4 x 4 grid. The pieces are numbered 1-4 in four different colors (making 16 in all). In the basic game, each player removes a "1" piece, and then takes turns jumping and removing pieces (like in checkers, but orthogonally, not diagonally). Each piece that is jumped must be of a different color than the one which is moved.

The game ends when one player cannot make another move. If the remaining pieces are of different colors, the player who CANNOT move takes the remaining pieces and adds their total to his score. However, if the pieces are all of the SAME color, the PREVIOUS player (the one who made the last move) gets the points, plus a 10-point-per-piece bonus. If the remaining colors are all black, the bonus is increased to 20 points per piece.

Needless to say, there are numerous variations to these rules among the 39 other games that can be played with this set.

* * *

The second and third editions boasted only 25 games, and these are listed below.

1 SCARNEY SOLITAIRE
2 SCARNEY SOLITAIRE MATCH
3 ADVANCED SCARNEY SOLITAIRE
4 ADVANCED SCARNEY SOLITAIRE MATCH
5 SCARNEY SINGLES
6 ADVANCED SCARNEY SINGLES
7 SCARNEY 101 SINGLES
8 ADVANCED SCARNEY 101 SINGLES
9 SCARNEY SINGLES LOWBALL
10 ADVANCED SCARNEY SINGLES LOWBALL
11 SCARNEY DOUBLES
12 ADVANCED SCARNEY DOUBLES
13 SCARNEY GIN DOUBLES (or Scarney Gin Doubles Match Play For Two Players)
14 ADVANCED SCARNEY GIN DOUBLES
15 SCARNEY GIN DOUBLES FOR THREE PLAYERS
16 ADVANCED SCARNEY GIN DOUBLES FOR THREE PLAYERS
17 SCARNEY PARTNERSHIP GIN DOUBLES
18 ADVANCED SCARNEY PARTNERSHIP GIN DOUBLES
19 SCARNEY CHALLENGE SOLITAIRE
20 SCARNEY CHALLENGE SOLITAIRE FOR CHILDREN
21 SCARNEY CHALLENGE SINGLES
22 SCARNEY CHALLENGE SINGLES OPPONENT’S CHOICE (or Name The Color)
23 SCARNEY SPEEDY CHALLENGE SINGLES
24 HIGH-LOW SCARNEY (or High-Low Match Play, or High-Low Scarney Match Play, or High-Low Match Play Scarney)
25 HIGH-LOW SCARNEY FOR THREE PLAYERS (or High-Low Three-Handed, or High-Low Scarney Three-Handed, or High-Low Three-Handed Scarney)
26 PARTNERSHIP HIGH-LOW SCARNEY (or Four-Handed Partnership High-Low Scarney)

There are in fact only five main games - numbers 1, 5, 11, 19, and 24 - with the others merely being minor variants or ways of incorporating additional players into the same basic framework of play. These base games are all described in "Scarne's Encyclopedia of Games".

Game 19 (and its variants numbers 21-23) has a set of 9 different objectives that can be set at the start (and two of these objectives have a choice of two flavours). The children's version, number 20, has a choice of 5 such objectives. Not having seen the rule book for the first edition of Scarney, I speculate that the figure of "40" may be derived simply by counting these different objectives within a game as distinct games.