It was originally published by Playboy (debuting with the September/October 1977 issue) and was briefly out of business in 1990 and 1991. The magazine was bought and brought back to life in 1991 by the mail-order company Bits & Pieces, and 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).
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", while 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 3 to 6 page article in the color pages having to do with 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 collages of items that share a common theme
Photo-mysteries which require the reader to use photos and text to deduce 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
Picture Tic-Tac-Toe 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 as well)
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:
crosswords
cryptic crosswords
word searches
cryptograms
math and logic puzzles
unique puzzle types such as crossword variations
visual logic puzzles like Paint by Numbers and Battleships
cartoon rebuses
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 3 pages; one set, which is revealed by folding one page in half to hide the second page, are clues rated 3-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 new feature of Pencilwise in recent years has been a Puzzlecraft column, authored by Mike Selinker, 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 100 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.
