This page reviews some of what I call "traditional" games: Games of skill and chance which have been widely popular throughout the United States (and often elsewhere). Some of these are commercial, owned by a single company, and others not. This page doesn't include card games, nor party games.
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Chess

There are many variants of Chess. Other than the variants involving the standard board and pieces, I've played two: Centre Chess is a rather lame variant played on a circular board. Hexchess, on the other hand, is an outstanding variants played on a board made of hexagons and playable by two or three people. It's worth seeking out. Both of these variants, I think, are out of print.

I think this is a great game.

Monopoly

Monopoly is one of the few survivors of the array of table games produced early in this century. These games tend to be different from their predecessors (e.g., Chess) in their complexity, and different from today's games in that less thought and effort went into producing a really balanced game, one that made straightforward sense. Thus, in Monopoly you have odds-and-ends like the utility cards (which are almost never worth having), and the various taxes and Chance and Community Chest cards. No doubt the sometimes-random nature of the game has led to the wealth of variants that exist.

Still, it is a fun game, and plays pretty quickly. I do recommend The Monopoly Book by Maxine Brady as an excellent, and perhaps exhaustive, strategy resource. However, I think it is out of print.

I think this is an okay game.

Scrabble

In contrast to Monopoly, Scrabble is a fairly simple game and one in which elegance and balance were clearly of great concern (as evident in the values of the tiles and the quasi-symmetry of the board). I think perhaps too much attention is given to the vocabulary of the players and not enough to the strategy of board location when this game is discussed. But I still enjoy playing it once in a while.

I think this is a good game.

Trivial Pursuit

One of the most popular new games of the 1980s, Trivial Pursuit is quite fun, albeit sometimes frustrating in some ways, especially when there are whole areas of human knowledge about which one doesn't know (many people are entirely ignorant of sports, for instance). It's also frustrating when playing against someone with a much wider range of knowledge for reasons you can do nothing about, such as playing against one's parents. (Not that this has ever happened to me, oh no!) Also, some of the questions are misleading or just plain wrong. Nonetheless, it's always worth a few laughs.

I think this is a good game.