Odhams Press book of games

Looking into increasingly more obscure one-off games online, I came across The Children's Book of Games, Puzzles and Pastimes by Odhams Press, variously quoted as being printed in 1952, 1954 or 1959.  There are about 10 games from this book listed on BoardGameGeek and some fine articles over on Colganology.

Odhams is an interesting publisher, ranging from mainstream magazines to Zap! comics.  I would like to see the whole book that these came from, but it's a $50-80 rarity right now.  The games looked trivial at first and yes, they mostly involve pulling cards from a deck and getting some points or moving a piece each time.  But they also feel like useful prototypes for more useful games.  

My favorite of the batch has the eminently colorful name of The Game of Visiting Birds' Nests Without Robbing Them.  You pull cards, check the image for the matching bird or animal, which gives or takes some number of eggs.  Another twist is that you have to keep the rat until the owl eats it, and as long as you have the rat you can only draw one card from the one pile of lower cards on your turn.  It's interesting that the deck is split into two decks, one with high cards and one with low cards, and you draw from both stacks each turn.  But if you play the cards one by one with no choice in the matter, it's just a set of manual tasks.  Idea: how about holding four cards (two from each draw pile) and choosing which order to play them?  Then drawing four more.  I can't picture the score sheet the rules talked about; would it be 8 columns, one for each egg type?  How about printing a set of eggs on mailing labels, sticking them on cardboard and actually taking those tokens as needed?  Or drafting up a little score card with 8 boxes and move some tiny chips or tokens from the game board to your score card as needed.  If there are a limited number of tokens, that adds to the variables.  Also, the cards that cause you to lose eggs, how about if black cards affect you but red cards affect the player of your choice?

Explore the River looks like a generic roll-and-move race game at first, but the spaces are labeled from Ace to King, so the idea is to pull cards and try to be the first to form a sequence from Ace to King from the cards drawn.  The map is just a cute scorecard, fun to move a piece, but totally unneccessary.  And the list of penalties for various face cards is a bit weak: instead of having one card of each type be "special", it would make more sense if, as you get higher up, there are more hazards.  Maybe have stars next to some spaces -- I think that 3, 7, 10, Q, K are well paced -- and on those spaces you draw a hazard card from a second deck: you can use the same table, just ignore the suit.

Speed looks like a standard race game with motorcycles, but again, it isn't.  The graphics mean nothing.  All that happens is you give or take cards between players, and the player who gets all the cards is the winner.  I can't think of a way to make that more interesting.  With two players, trading to the left or right are the same, so as they say "it's more fun when more players play."  Based on their other designs, I would expect the motorcycles to have numbers for each card and messages like "give one", "take two", rather than a plan text table of results, though the plain text can be more desscriptive.

Market Day is basic race game with two starting points.  Around the World is just a race game with red and black bad and good spaces, and Sailing Game is just a race with some codewords like "Fair Wind" on the spaces to move plus or minus a space or two.  The Mountaineering Game is also just a race with ups and downs marked on the board.

Overall, this is a fun variety of activities for younger players, and any players who were like I was when I was twelve might think of rule variations, as I just did.  The artwork really gives them character, even when the gameplay itself is too simple to engage the brain.