SOLD SEPARATELY.(man's collection of board games auctioned)

Sid Sackson, in his 1975 book "Beyond Tic Tac Toe," wrote, "Games mean many things to many people; to me, they are an art form of great potential beauty." If so, Sackson, who died late last year, at the age of eighty-two, was a prodigious and versatile master. He designed dozens of ingenious strategy games--Acquire, Can't Stop, Focus--and clever variations on poker, dominoes, and other classics.

Then, there was Sackson's collection, reputed to be the world's largest. "From the first year we were married, 1941, he had all of the boards," Bernice Sackson, a diminutive eighty-year-old with reddish-brown hair, said the other day at her house in the north Bronx. "In 1970, he stopped working as a civil engineer and began collecting in earnest." He maintained a rigorous regimen of toy fairs, garage sales, and review-copy requests. "Scarsdale church tag sales, those were the best," she said.

The collection overtook the house. As Bernice walked from the ground-floor living room, where an urn containing her husband's ashes sits beside three lifetime-achievement statuettes from toy-and-game associations, to the second-floor parlor, she explained, "Our daughter used this room for dating for a little while. But in '72 she got married, and from that time on it was for Sid." So were a first-floor study, the basement, the garage, the upstairs kitchen, and several bedrooms.

Sackson enjoyed what he acquired; he and Bernice entertained regularly, and all game-related activity was chronicled in leather-bound diaries. (June 4, 1977: "Played The Winning Ticket with the Sapersteins. They were quite enthusiastic with it.") He also saw his holdings--although they were never inventoried, fifteen thousand items wouldn't be a bad guess--as a research opportunity. "His big dream was to have a game museum," Bernice said. "He was hoping to have a college acquire the collection, and he would take care of it." Many institutions turned him down, however. "They would always say the same thing: 'Where did you get your degree?' And he didn't have a doctorate."

About a decade ...