Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, R.C. Bell, Dover, 1979.
Last year, I got to play Nine-Men’s Morris, a more challenging relative of tic-tac-toe. (I lost consistently:( But that inspired me to find a book describing many old games: mancala, various race games, dice games, positional games. This book describes more than a hundred games, typically with enough detail in the rules to get started. (For any individual game, there are certainly better resources, but this gives you a good set of starting points.) (Reviewed Jan., ’04)