Gamesmanship.

• Position: What's new? Holiday gifts galore - Buyers Guide

The holiday season is always one in which toys and games play a prominent role when it comes to gift-giving. This year's crop of the latter is an entertainingly varied one.

Old Century Baseball ($129.99) from Front Porch Classics, Seattle, Wash., is a spiffed-up version of a time-honored pinball game that reproduced the Nation's Pastime by having a batted ball fall into various holes representing hits and outs. The current version is richly crafted from aged woods, up to and including a triple-deck grandstand beyond the outfield, and the flipper/bat is triggered manually, rather than mechanically. The game, however, remains the same: Score as many runs as you can before three outs are recorded, and keep alternating turns at bat throughout nine innings--or more, if the score remains tied. Nostalgic old-timers and kids just learning to wear their caps backwards will literally have a ball with Old Century Baseball, whether with inter- or intragenerational contests.

Front Porch's Dread Pirate ($99.99) is a swashbuckling board game that will harken players back to Treasure Island or Errol Flynn debonairly dueling with Basil Rathbone on the quarterdeck of a corsair on the Spanish Main. The game, played on a treasure map that is cleverly aged and illustrated to look like it's right out of the pocket of Captain Kidd, is replete with all sorts of buccaneer paraphernalia--a wooden pirate's chest, simulated leather pouches bulging with doubloons, oodles of booty, and knuckle bones that serve as dice to move the players around. Grand fun can be had by those who cast inhibitions to the wind and cut loose with an occasional "Avast me hearties" or "Yo-ho-ho? though swordplay is a no-no!

Cram! ($34.99), Front Porch's final entry, is one of countless Trivial Pursuit wanna-bes, albeit a far more raucous one, as evidenced by its subtitle: "The intensely competitive laughing, guessing, acting, drawing, singing/shouting game" Pegged to a distinctly fictional college life--unless you attend Faber College of "Animal House" infamy--the game hinges on questions such as "Which of the following was the original name for singing duo Sonny and Cher?: Caesar & Coco, Hanky Panky, The Pancakes, Sunshine, or Blueberry Tricycle?" If you correctly chose the first answer, you're obviously ready to graduate trivia cum laude.

USAopoly, Encinitas, Calif., has been having a field day reissuing classic board games with new faces. The company's imagination seems boundless, as it...