The present book is composed of 17 essays by 20 authors. As Warren DeBoer remarks in his concluding remarks (Chapter 17), “16 chapters are too many to consider individually.” More than a century after S. Culin's pioneer study (1907), this book represents a major contribution on a topic frequently forgotten or, worse, discarded by numerous investigators as anecdotic. However, the paucity of archaeological data, especially on games practiced in the United States before and after the conquest, drew most authors to describe the games they study in a holistic perspective, taking into consideration their ritual significance as well as their social, political, or economic implications and consequences. A side effect of their approach is the difficulty differentiating between games and gambling, while, as argued in Susan Evans's essay (Chapter 15), these two activities have different implications. While games might have social, political and religious implications, with literally hundreds of participants, gambling is a much more individual, mundane activity, which can even imply cheating, an aspect that contradicts somewhat the ritual significance of most games. It would be necessary to further distinguish between betting and gambling. Incidentally, the link between gambling and slavery (Chapter 16, by Catherine M. Cameron and Lindsay D. Johansson) does not seem to exist in most documented games.

Basically, the book regroups two quite different sets of articles. Five essays (Chapter 11, by Mark Harlan; Chapter 12, by John Walden and Barbara Voorhies; Chapter13, by Marijke Stoll and David Anderson; Chapter 14, by Gerardo Gutierrez; and Chapter 15, by Susan Evans) bear on Mesoamerica, the other 12 upon very different indigenous groups in the United States. This distinction is not only geographical, but it reflects the nature of the available data. For Mesoamerica, we can rely on abundant archaeological, iconographical, and ethnohistorical evidence, which allow for a solid analytical basis. Games of the North American Indians have deeply suffered from a lack of interest, and therefore a lack of data. This means that, apart from a few well-documented cases such as Chunkey and the site of Cahokia (Chapter 5, by Thomas Zych), most authors must deal with eclectic, often hypothetical data and must complete their analysis with ethnohistorical, and even historical and contemporary documentation (see Chapter 8, by Joel Janetski, for instance). True archaeological data, such as shell gorgets, remain exceptional (Chapter 3, by Grant Stauffer and Kent Reilly III). This does not mean that these contributions are less interesting or pertinent, but that they remain much more hypothetical, in spite of the authors’ endeavors to recover every bit of archaeological evidence. Anecdotally, it is not surprising that the book editor, Barbara Voorhies, is herself a Mesoamericanist.

Most authors insist upon gender differentiation in their contributions. Men's games are often compared and contrasted with women's games, which reflects other distinctions between chance and strategy games (dice, for instance), and strength and physical prowess, or manual dexterity games, mostly practiced by men. While such differentiation must not be overestimated, given the bewildering variety of games and occurrences, we cannot minimize their implications. But the interest on gender differentiation somewhat conceals the educational value of many games. While we may (maybe) discard the educational aspect of strategy games, even if from a ritual point of view, their implications might have religious relevance, and obviously, strength and physical prowess games certainly played an important part in the formation of future members of many communities. However, references to children only appear in five articles, the most important being Mark Harlan's contribution on the Chalcatzingo figurines (Chapter 11), as an educational device to prepare children for the identification of strangers and members of their own community. While not really convincing and certainly not pertinent for other figurine corpuses (such as Jaina), it does provide a new perspective.

Throughout the book, almost all authors coincide upon the religious and ritual importance of games. According to the available data, games’ significance can be linked to mythical events, mortuary and curative practices, and fertility rituals. Specific interpretations are frequently acceptable and sometimes documented (for funerary practices, see for instance Chapter 2, Kevin Leonard); games are interpreted as deeply inserted in the religious sphere. However, as Zych (p. 83) pertinently remarks, we must not overinterpret the religious dimension, lest we reflect our anthropological preoccupation rather than true significance. The presence of game artifacts in funerary context might only reflect the deceased's activities or dedication. We must once again refer to Susan Evans's chapter. She properly reminds us that even in our world, players are often characterized by their credulity and superstition: we are so deeply involved in our own practices that we tend to forget such ritual practices. It is still much more interesting to remark that Stoll and Anderson (Chapter 13) discard, in part, the usual religious interpretations of the Mesoamerican ballgame to favor a politically integrative dimension. This is all the more important because their study relies precisely on well-documented archaeological data.

Last, we can regret the methodological bias of referring almost uniquely to North American authors and/or to the paucity of contributions translated into English. While this is quite understandable for most contributions bearing on traditional games in the US territory, it constitutes a methodological drift, from an anthropological perspective. Let us just mention two examples. As said above, most essays in this book rightly insist on the importance of women's games. It would have been appropriate to mention A. López Austin's book, Juegos rituales aztecas (1965), which was among the first studies to document women's games in Mesoamerica. In their study of Patolli (Chapter 12), Walden and Voorhies present a systematic corpus of known examples from the Maya area. But the well-documented Patolli board from Tonina is notably absent: Is it because it has been published in French?

To summarize, this book has the merit of opening many new paths for the study of traditional games and demonstrating that they are deeply intertwined with numerous aspects of prehistoric societies, not only from a ritual point of view, but also because they reflect other activities, such as agricultural and economical practices. Far from being epiphenomenal, they offer new perspectives for our understanding of these civilizations. Let us hope that this book will not suffer the same fate as Culin's study: a major contribution, soon falling into oblivion.