This is the first of four volumes containing reprints of the papers in the original Cabal Seminar volumes of the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics series [cabal i, cabal ii, cabal iii, cabal iv], unpublished material, and new papers. We have grouped the papers of the original Cabal Seminar volumes according to their topics. This volume contains the papers on “Games and Scales” (Part I) and “Suslin Cardinals, Partition Properties, Homogeneity” (Part II). Each of the parts contains an introductory survey (written by John Steel and Steve Jackson, respectively) putting the papers into a present-day context. Table 1 gives an overview of the papers in this volume with their original references.

This volume must not be understood as a historical edition of old papers. In the 1980s, there were a number of results obtained by the researchers associated with the Cabal Seminar, some of which were intended for a fifth Cabal volume that was never published. We include some of these papers in this volume, together with papers reporting on new developments related to the research of the Cabal Seminar. These papers are Steel's “Scales in K(ℝ)” and “The Length-ω1 Open Game Quantifier Propagates Scales” in Part Iand “The Equivalence of Partition Properties and Determinacy” and “Generic Codes for Uncountable Ordinals, Partition Properties, and Elementary Embeddings” by Kechris and Woodin, “The Tree of a Moschovakis Scale is Homogeneous” by Martin and Steel, and “Weakly Homogeneous Trees” by Martin and Woodin in Part II.