Although the new lineup was becoming more experimental with longer, improvised concert performances, the Yardbirds' record company brought in successful singles producer Most to coax out more commercial product.

In 1966, the Beck/Page dual lead guitar line-up produced the psychedelic "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago", "Psycho Daisies" and "Stroll On", the updated remake of "The Train Kept A-Rollin'" for their appearance in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up.

However, by the end of 1966, Beck was fired from the band due to an illness that was preventing him from playing gigs while on tour in the US, and they continued as a quartet with Page as the sole guitarist.

Most was not current with new music trends and although Page had worked earlier for Most as a session guitarist, he was reportedly displeased with Most taking on the production duties.

It uses a "DADGAD" guitar tuning, giving it an Eastern music sound, which is enhanced with Indian-percussion tabla played by Chris Karan and an oboe melody line.

Another instrumental, "Glimpses", features guitar parts with Page using a wah-wah pedal and sampled train station and children's playground sounds after a voice-manipulated reading of a poem.

[5] In fact one song, the pop-ish "Little Soldier Boy" was issued with McCarty's rough vocal guide providing the part intended for a trumpet.

The song includes a guitar solo that Page had been using in the group's concert performances of "Dazed and Confused" (which he carried over, with some different lyrics, to Led Zeppelin).

Unlike the Yardbirds' three previous charting singles ("Shapes of Things", "Over Under Sideways Down" and "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"), "Little Games" was not written by group members.

Another pop song recorded was "No Excess Baggage", by the Brill Building songwriters Roger Atkins and Carl D'Errico, who composed the Animals Top 40 hit "It's My Life".

[6] The remaining album songs are credited to the band members and include "Drinking Muddy Water", an interpretation of the blues classic "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and nominally a tribute to bluesman Muddy Waters, and "Smile on Me", a re-working of Howlin' Wolf's "Shake for Me" (which Wolf later re-worked for his "Killing Floor" which Led Zeppelin adapted for "The Lemon Song").

[6] Russo describes the four and a half minute instrumental collage "Glimpses" as a "brilliant piece of psychedelic imagery [that] revealed the Yardbirds at their most experimental and inspired".

A barely-understandable truncated mechanical-sounding voice recites: Glimpses of clouds in a forest Can review well within us And never to linger on one is life Energy radiates from the source The life around us is but a reflection of our own Flowing within never-ending boundless infinity Time is just a cumular limit Which with one glimpse can overcome Can overcome[8] The psychedelic folk-style song "Only the Black Rose" is credited to Relf and features his vocal with acoustic guitar accompaniment by Page and some subdued percussion effects.

[7] As with "Little Games" and unlike their previous hits, the Yardbirds' subsequent singles were written by others: Tony Hazzard composed "Ha Ha Said the Clown" (a pop hit for Manfred Mann) and the similarly pop-ish "Good Night Sweet Josephine" and Harry Nilsson supplied "Ten Little Indians", written in the style of a nursery rhyme.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Rolling Stones' Flowers, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow and the self-titled debut albums The Doors and The Grateful Dead.

AllMusic's Bruce Eder gave it three out of five stars and wrote "If almost any group other than the Yardbirds had released Little Games, it would be considered a flawed but prime late-'60s psychedelic/hard rock artifact instead of a serious step backward, and even a disappointment".

[11] The Yardbirds themselves were just as critical – Page reportedly regarded Little Games as "horrible"[4] and Jim McCarty described Mickie Most as "a protagonist in our downfall".