GAMES Magazine
Encyclopedia
Games magazine is a United States
magazine
devoted to game
s and puzzle
s, and is published by Games Publications, a division of Kappa Publishing Group
.
(debuting with the September/October 1977 issue), then in 1987 was acquired by PSC Limited Partnership for 3 years and then was briefly out of business in 1990 and 1991 after the PSC owners filed for bankruptcy. The magazine was bought and brought back to life in 1991 by the mail-order company Bits & Pieces based in Manhattan
. Kappa Publishing Group acquired it in 1996 and moved the Games office to Kappa's headquarters in Pennsylvania
. The magazine is published ten times a year (monthly, except for January and June).
Recent issues have included a multipart puzzle over several pages, where the solution of each sub-puzzle is used to complete the overall puzzle. Recent versions of these have been based on traveling to various locations in the world, though this aspect is only used for the theme of each sub-puzzle.
Each "Pencilwise" also contains "The World's Most Ornery Crossword", a large standard crossword puzzle which has two sets of clues spanning three pages; one set, which is revealed by folding one page in half to hide the second page, are clues rated three stars, while the clues under this fold are rated as one star; the answers to both sets of clues are the same.
Recent years have seen two pages of "Pencilwise" dedicated to puzzles aimed at pre-teen children.
Another feature of "Pencilwise" in recent years has been a "Puzzlecraft" column, authored by Mike Selinker
and Thomas Snyder
, that describes how readers can make their own puzzles, placed alongside puzzles created by the described techniques.
list, similar to the German Spiel des Jahres
, and usually includes a contest based on this list. More recent years have also included a separate Electronic Games 100, focusing on video games for both computer, console, and portable systems. Notable game titles also introduced into a Games Hall of Fame, updated each year along with the Games 100 list.
Readers who write in with mistakes (in a section called "Laundry") or alternate solutions to puzzles (in the "Eureka" section) are often rewarded with a Games T-shirt
. Readers may otherwise obtain a Games T-shirt by being a runner-up in a Games contest.
As part of the "Games 100", there is usually a contest to identify selected games featured in that list based on small pictures of the board or playing pieces from the game in a photo montage.
Earlier in its publishing history, the Letters page would also include an "Envelope of the Month", typically a highly decorated envelope or postcard sent in by a reader in response to a contest or general correspondence with the magazine. The winner of this would receive a Games T-shirt. This feature was phased out when the magazine changed publishers and publication schedules.
Games has had two rather large contest series in the past that have since been discontinued. The first contest was a scavenger hunt
that ran in yearly installments; items in the hunt were usually not rare but difficult to determine what exactly was needed (requiring some puzzle solving or research) or hard to acquire. Winners were determined based on the most objects collected and fitting the requirements. A second long-running contest was "Calculatrivia", where a long equation, of approximately 40 variables, was given, and each variable was associated with a clue that resulted in some numerical value. The clues were usually straightforward to interpret, but the required information would take considerable research effort to identify. When all variables were accounted for, the equation was to be worked out, and the final value mailed into Games along with a list of the individual values.
(ISSN 1074-4355) on a bimonthly basis. This magazine is similar to an extended "Pencilwise" section of Games. Until recently, it also contained a contest in every issue, most often a variety crossword or trivia quiz. (As of the July 2009 issue, the contests have been discontinued, but no explanation has been given.)
Bygone sister publications of Games include The Four-Star Puzzler (1981–1983), Games Special Edition (late 1980s-1990), Games Premium Puzzles (early 1990s), and Pencilwise Extra (also early 1990s). Children's magazines put out by Games were Games Junior (1987–1990) and Zigzag (mid-1990s). Games has also published a number of books containing "best-of" puzzle collections.
started at Games in November 1978, and edited the magazine from 1989 to 1993. He left when he became the current editor of The New York Times
crossword puzzle.
The current editorial team includes Wayne Schmittberger and Jennifer Orehowsky, with help from Kappa Publishing editors Karen Powell.
Graphic designers include Kevin Boone.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
devoted to game
Game
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...
s and puzzle
Puzzle
A puzzle is a problem or enigma that tests the ingenuity of the solver. In a basic puzzle, one is intended to put together pieces in a logical way in order to come up with the desired solution...
s, and is published by Games Publications, a division of Kappa Publishing Group
Kappa Publishing Group
Kappa Publishing Group, Inc. is a Blue Bell, Pennsylvania based publishing company concentrating on adult puzzle books and magazines as well as children's magazines and maps. It is a private company founded in 1955 with $11.5 million in annual sales....
.
History
It was originally published by PlayboyPlayboy Enterprises
Playboy Enterprises, Inc. is a privately held global media and lifestyle company founded by Hugh Marston Hefner to manage the Playboy magazine empire. Its programming and content are available worldwide on television networks, Websites, mobile platforms and radio...
(debuting with the September/October 1977 issue), then in 1987 was acquired by PSC Limited Partnership for 3 years and then was briefly out of business in 1990 and 1991 after the PSC owners filed for bankruptcy. The magazine was bought and brought back to life in 1991 by the mail-order company Bits & Pieces based in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. Kappa Publishing Group acquired it in 1996 and moved the Games office to Kappa's headquarters in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
. The magazine is published ten times a year (monthly, except for January and June).
Style
Throughout its publishing history, Games has differentiated itself from other puzzle magazines by its creative covers that are themselves puzzles, color sections containing feature articles and games, and a large variety of puzzle types, with wit and humor used throughout. Each issue contains a feature article and puzzles in its introductory color section, "Pencilwise", board and video game reviews in its closing color section, and "Wild Cards".Content
All puzzles in the magazine are ranked by difficulty: a one-star puzzle is an "Easy Hike"; two stars is an "Uphill Climb"; three stars means "Proceed at Your Own Risk". Some puzzles are ranked as a "Mixed Bag" denoted by one filled and one unfilled star, meaning that some may find the puzzle very easy while others will be challenged, that the puzzle may have a range of difficulty with it, or that (like many logic puzzles) it may easily be solved by exhaustive trial and error but requires thinking to solve in a deductive way.Major article
Each issue typically has a three to six page article about gaming and hobbies as a broad subject.Color sections
Common puzzles in the color sections include:- Eyeball Benders which require identification of common objects based on photos taken from odd angles.
- Identification of objects in picture collageCollageA collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
s of items that share a common theme. - Photo-mysteries which require the reader to use photos and text to solve a mystery.
- Call Our Bluff, where several small anecdotes of historical fact are mixed in with made-up stories of the same style, and the reader is challenged to determine the fake stories from the real ones. The April 2000 issue had a "Call Our Bluff" article in which, as an April Fool's Day joke, the anecdotes were all true (in spite of the fact that many of them were very hard to believe).
- Picture Tic-Tac-ToeTic-tac-toeTic-tac-toe, also called wick wack woe and noughts and crosses , is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The X player usually goes first...
which requires the reader to determine a common theme for each row, column, and diagonal of a 3x3 matrix of pictures. - Trivia quizzes with both text and pictures as clues.
- Identification of cities or countries from either postcards (with identifying words stripped from each one) or from sections of road maps. (These have also commonly been used for contests in the magazine).
Recent issues have included a multipart puzzle over several pages, where the solution of each sub-puzzle is used to complete the overall puzzle. Recent versions of these have been based on traveling to various locations in the world, though this aspect is only used for the theme of each sub-puzzle.
Pencilwise
Pencilwise is a newsprint pencil puzzle section which forms the core of the magazine and contains common puzzle varieties such as:- crosswordCrosswordA crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of white and shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer...
s - cryptic crosswordCryptic crosswordCryptic crosswords are crossword puzzles in which each clue is a word puzzle in and of itself. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, Ireland, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta,...
s - word searchWord searchA word search, word find, word seek, word sleuth or mystery word puzzle is a word game that is letters of a word in a grid, that usually has a rectangular or square shape. The objective of this puzzle is to find and mark all the words hidden inside the box. The words may be horizontally,...
es - cryptogramCryptogramA cryptogram is a type of puzzle which consists of a short piece of encrypted text. Generally the cipher used to encrypt the text is simple enough that cryptogram can be solved by hand. Frequently used are substitution ciphers where each letter is replaced by a different letter or number. To solve...
s - math and logic puzzleLogic puzzleA logic puzzle is a puzzle deriving from the mathematics field of deduction.-History:The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
s - unique puzzle types such as crossword variations
- visual logic puzzles like "Paint by Numbers" and "BattleshipsBattleship (puzzle)The Battleship puzzle is a logic puzzle based on the Battleship guessing game...
" - cartoon rebusRebusA rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames, for example in its basic form 3 salmon fish to denote the name "Salmon"...
es - variety of other wordplay and visual puzzles
Each "Pencilwise" also contains "The World's Most Ornery Crossword", a large standard crossword puzzle which has two sets of clues spanning three pages; one set, which is revealed by folding one page in half to hide the second page, are clues rated three stars, while the clues under this fold are rated as one star; the answers to both sets of clues are the same.
Recent years have seen two pages of "Pencilwise" dedicated to puzzles aimed at pre-teen children.
Another feature of "Pencilwise" in recent years has been a "Puzzlecraft" column, authored by Mike Selinker
Mike Selinker
Mike Selinker is a game designer whose design credits include Pirates of the Spanish Main and Fightball with James Ernest, Axis & Allies Revised Edition with Larry Harris, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, and Risk Godstorm. He was a creative director for the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons...
and Thomas Snyder
Thomas Snyder
Thomas Snyder is an American puzzle creator and world-champion sudoku solver. He writes a puzzle blog as Dr. Sudoku.-Early life and education:Thomas Snyder grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York...
, that describes how readers can make their own puzzles, placed alongside puzzles created by the described techniques.
Wild Cards
Wild Cards is the final section which typically contains one or two pages of puzzle miscellany, such as word games, trivia, or chess problems.December issue
The December issue each year includes a compilation of new and noteworthy games in its Games 100GAMES 100
The Games 100 is an annual feature of Games magazine, a United States magazine devoted to games and puzzles. The Games 100 first appeared in the November/December 1980 issue as an alphabetic list of the 100 games preferred by the editors of the magazine...
list, similar to the German Spiel des Jahres
Spiel des Jahres
The Spiel des Jahres is an award for board and card games, created in 1978 with the stated purpose of rewarding excellence in game design, and promoting top-quality games in the German market. It is thought that the existence and popularity of the award is one of the major drivers of the quality...
, and usually includes a contest based on this list. More recent years have also included a separate Electronic Games 100, focusing on video games for both computer, console, and portable systems. Notable game titles also introduced into a Games Hall of Fame, updated each year along with the Games 100 list.
Contests
Most issues used to feature a puzzle-solving contest, often with cash prizes, though this was no longer a regular feature of the magazine by 2010. In the past, the magazine also ran an occasional hidden contest, in which part of the challenge was to find the concealed puzzle with instructions on how to enter (e.g. "You have found the hidden contest. To enter, send us a chain of paper clips."). Until November 2002, readers were also challenged to find the fake advertisement among the legitimate ones (the last one was for the Red Card, a credit card used to pay off credit cards).Readers who write in with mistakes (in a section called "Laundry") or alternate solutions to puzzles (in the "Eureka" section) are often rewarded with a Games T-shirt
T-shirt
A T-shirt is a style of shirt. A T-shirt is buttonless and collarless, with short sleeves and frequently a round neck line....
. Readers may otherwise obtain a Games T-shirt by being a runner-up in a Games contest.
As part of the "Games 100", there is usually a contest to identify selected games featured in that list based on small pictures of the board or playing pieces from the game in a photo montage.
Earlier in its publishing history, the Letters page would also include an "Envelope of the Month", typically a highly decorated envelope or postcard sent in by a reader in response to a contest or general correspondence with the magazine. The winner of this would receive a Games T-shirt. This feature was phased out when the magazine changed publishers and publication schedules.
Games has had two rather large contest series in the past that have since been discontinued. The first contest was a scavenger hunt
Scavenger hunt
A scavenger hunt is a game in which the organizers prepare a list defining specific items, using which the participants — individuals or teams — seek to gather all items on the list — usually without purchasing them — or perform tasks or take photographs of the items, as specified...
that ran in yearly installments; items in the hunt were usually not rare but difficult to determine what exactly was needed (requiring some puzzle solving or research) or hard to acquire. Winners were determined based on the most objects collected and fitting the requirements. A second long-running contest was "Calculatrivia", where a long equation, of approximately 40 variables, was given, and each variable was associated with a clue that resulted in some numerical value. The clues were usually straightforward to interpret, but the required information would take considerable research effort to identify. When all variables were accounted for, the equation was to be worked out, and the final value mailed into Games along with a list of the individual values.
Special editions
Games Publications also publishes Games World of PuzzlesGAMES World of Puzzles
Games World of Puzzles is a puzzle magazine published bimonthly by Games Publications, a division of Kappa Publishing Group. It is a spinoff of Games magazine focusing solely on pencil puzzles. A centerpiece section contains a feature puzzle or puzzles, such as puzzles from the World Puzzle...
(ISSN 1074-4355) on a bimonthly basis. This magazine is similar to an extended "Pencilwise" section of Games. Until recently, it also contained a contest in every issue, most often a variety crossword or trivia quiz. (As of the July 2009 issue, the contests have been discontinued, but no explanation has been given.)
Bygone sister publications of Games include The Four-Star Puzzler (1981–1983), Games Special Edition (late 1980s-1990), Games Premium Puzzles (early 1990s), and Pencilwise Extra (also early 1990s). Children's magazines put out by Games were Games Junior (1987–1990) and Zigzag (mid-1990s). Games has also published a number of books containing "best-of" puzzle collections.
Editors
Will ShortzWill Shortz
Will Shortz is an American puzzle creator and editor, and currently the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times.-Early life and education:...
started at Games in November 1978, and edited the magazine from 1989 to 1993. He left when he became the current editor of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
crossword puzzle.
The current editorial team includes Wayne Schmittberger and Jennifer Orehowsky, with help from Kappa Publishing editors Karen Powell.
Graphic designers include Kevin Boone.