That was before my time. But I’m sure SOMEONE got it. 
If you want to try your hand at it again, it was reprinted in at least one Games collection as “What Are the Rules of this Puzzle?”.
Dammit, I know I read this story in some contest retrospective, but I don’t remember what it was.
Yes, there was, relatively recently. Can’t remember any details of when it was, sorry.
If we’re thinking of the same thing try searching for Picross. There’s quite a few sites out there that offer puzzles and there’s a pretty good implementation of about 350 puzzles of various sizes and difficulty for the Nintendo DS.
Have that game. Mine’s in Japanese since I never imagined that it would come to the US. I also like Conceptis, who creates Games’s P-b-N’s. (I won a t-shirt from them once, though I’ve never won a Games t-shirt.) I prefer paper-and-pencil solving, though. I do have two books published by Conceptis sitting on my shelf–I suppose I should work on those. 
I thought I’d resurrect this thread to mention that Games has disappeared again… sort of. Actually, as of this month’s issue, it’s been merged with its sister publication, Games World of Puzzles, into a single magazine, though they’ve decided to go with the latter name. Jennifer Orehowsky, whom twickster mentioned upthread, is still on staff, though Wayne Schmittberger, who edited the magazine for 36 years, is now gone.
I should probably mention that I’m a (very) occasional contributor to the magazine, though it seems I was the last one to find out about the recent reorganization. 
twickster, are you still working as a puzzle solver for them?
Fortunately there are now two variety cryptics per issue so we have not lost one of these precious rarities with the merging.
Should have known that the Dope would be full of Games people. If we’re bragging, I sold Will Shortz an article and a couple of shorter pieces back in the day, way back in their first incarnation before he was Editor. Had to be words; I like puzzles - I’m just not very good at them.
Games wasn’t the same after it went out of business the first time, though.
And a sugar packet with a picture of a woodpecker on it.
One quiz that stuck with me was a bunch of odd tasks/scenarios, with challenge of determining if they would take seconds, hours, days, months, years or centuries. One question: one inch of rain falls on a one-square-mile plot of land. If you caught every drop, how long would it take you to drink it all at one quart/minute?
Converting to metric for simplicity: 160,000cm * 160,000cm * 2.5cm =64 billion cc = 64 million liters.
1 liter/min -> 64 million minutes = 1,066,666 hours = 44,444 days = 1.2 CENTURIES.
With the bumping of this thread, I will note that Games and World of Puzzles have fused into one magazine due to “market realities.”
It’s really sad, though I will agree that it changed in relatively recent times. World of Puzzles too. Not nearly as “smart” as it used to be, IMO.
Other opinions and notes:
I miss the Photocrimes.
I love metapuzzles, and was sad that they got easier when they were published.
The previously mentioned variety cryptics, though, seem as fresh and clever as ever.
Cessation of magazines like this are one big reason I deplore the e-reader thing.
It amuses me to think back to contests like Calculatrivia, and how hard they were to research when they were first published, and how trivial (heh) it is now. (Seriously, it was hard book searching or praying with syndicated TV to find out the exact number of Tribbles in Spock’s famed line in “The Trouble With Tribbles” versus two seconds with Google now.)
My family started subscribing to Games in the early '80s and I got hooked on crosswords (regular and cryptic), especially the themed ones. I even had my own subscription for a year or two in the '90s, even though it doesn’t make financial sense in Canada (the newsstand price is cheaper).
The articles definitely became less interesting in the '90s (less off-the-wall stuff). Now and then, I’ll pick up a copy of Games World of Puzzles, but the 1- and 2-star crosswords are too easy for me (not the magazine’s fault, I just improved over time) and I’m not really interested in non-word puzzles like Paint By Numbers, Kakuro, Battleships, etc. so sometimes it seems like a waste.
I’ve been getting *Games *for years, and the first thing I do is work on the cryptics. Then I go to the cryptic + something else puzzle and think there’s no way to solve this. You have to find where the across clue goes, add or subtract a letter, or find that there’s a hidden theme where a symbol takes place of letter groups, yow! But, I put in one letter at a time, stumble across the unifying theme, and the rest falls in place. When I’m stuck, I look at the title, and even that’s a clue.
I despise logic puzzles. I know how to use the grids, and look for clues that can be combined, but usually wind up with a 5-space row with 3 Xs and 2 blanks. I don’t want to use trial-end-error and risk having to start over again.
I generally like the Paint By Numbers puzzles, but find that most of them don’t contain enough information to solve. I remember seeing people complain about them in the letters section, and they ask if testers are able to solve them before publication. The response from the editors was kind of vague, alleging time restraints, but they gotta fill up space sometimes.
The only time I ever ripped up a *Games *magazine in frustration was when I was struggling with the Hangman puzzles, then read the directions that said all the solutions were French words. That just shows how much I get into *Games *.
It seems to me the Paint by Numbers puzzles are ones which lend themselves well to computational solutions. That is, surely someone could come up with a computer program which verifies that the given solution (and only the given solution) is paintable given the clues. If I were a better logician I might try writing one myself…
How many times did the magazine intend for the answer to be an integer, only to discover a mistake that resulted in the answer including a fraction with a large denominator or the fourth root of a large integer?
I also notice that, as things currently stand, it is impossible to get a Games T-Shirt now. (They got rid of the letter column, and the runner-up prize in the contests is a year’s subscription to the magazine.) Of course, that makes mine more valuable…
Besides getting rid of the letters / Eureka / Laundry Basket, the one change I don’t like is putting the answers all the way in the back. I am too used to looking for the Wild Cards there.
Nah, haven’t done that since the last round of budget cuts there – couple of years ago now. (Last year was the first year since I left there full-time in '06 that I didn’t get a 1099 from them.)
Still know a bunch of those people, and I’ve been invited to pitch ideas for feature articles. Haven’t jumped on it because they don’t pay all that well, but if anyone wants to suggest ideas for stories you’d like to see, let me know.
I stopped subscribing to Games I think the second time my subscription got zapped. I usually buy at airports before trips, but the last time I went to DC no newstand had any.
Will the combined edition have articles like Games did?
Though good cryptics books are rare, I got a collection from the Nation which is quite good, and a bit quirky. No variety ones, though.
When I retire I’m going to teach myself Javascript by writing a paint by number solver. My big complaint about them is that big ones are very unforgiving of mistakes. I’m curious about how far you can get with just the fairly obvious strategies, if you can directly solve with some more interesting ones, or if you have to construct a hypothesis and test it for contradictions.
I was an early subscriber and had a stack of them. When I finally figured out cryptic crosswords, I hauled out that stack and had a fun few days
I remember that Scavenger Hunt well- the ONLY items I couldn’t find were the swizzle stick with a heart on it (I heard later that Southwest Airlines used to have them) and the sugar packet with a woodpecker on it!
I have no inside knowledge, but I heard that, when Games first disappeared, it was NOT because they were doing badly financially. On the contrary, they had a large subscriber base and a fair amount of cash. But Playboy used the cash from Games subscribers to finance some other enterprises that didn’t pan out, and in the end, they shut down most of their publications, including Games.
Yes, but now they’re in the middle of the magazine instead of the beginning. IIRC, they’re also no longer on “slick” paper, so the photos aren’t quite as sharp as before.
What about logo extraction puzzles? I seem to remember Games ran these, at least once, and I thought it was a pretty clever idea.
Oddly enough, one of my strongest memories of early Games magazine is ads for the Benson & Hedges 100 contest, where you could win one of a bunch (100?) of prizes that involves 100 of something, like “100 minutes in a hot-air balloon”. The ad was always a double-page spread on the inside front cover with little cartoons illustrating the various prizes.
They still do those - in fact, the September 2014 issue has one, using circular logos, although it used full logos. The last “logo extraction” puzzle appears to be on the cover of the September 2013 issue.
It was a more-or-less annual thing. Here are some links to the prizes:
Note that, in each case, it was 100 separate sweepstakes; you had to select the one you were entering on the entry form. I also found a letter to the winner of a separate contest for predicting which of the 100 contests would have the most and the fewest entries.