Cool, thanks for the blast from the past! Those ads are indelibly linked with Games magazine for me.
The one puzzle that I came to enjoy more than any other was 500 Rummy, where you would be provided with a grid full of letters, each one assigned a playing card value, and it was your job to put together as many words as you could that were also proper rummy hands.
I really miss The World’s Most Ornery Crossword Puzzle. I’m hopeless with cryptics, and most average crosswords are too easy. I usually found that TWMOCP would keep me working for a couple of weeks without frustrating me so much that I gave up.
The Nov. 2014 has The World’s Most Ornery, and it is- I can’t get anywhere with it 
Cryptics are frustrating until you learn the “secret codes,” and then they are a blast. Don’t give up on them. Find a book with easier puzzles and give cryptics a try again. They are easily my favorite puzzle, and I love almost all types of puzzles. The ones in * Games *are of moderate, but the difficult one in Harper’s every month is tops!
May as well ask this again…is there going to be a compendium on CD? That’s what I’m interested in. Anytime I tried to collect any kind of long-running series on paper, I always end up with gaps and/or losing a bunch of them.
The website’s store isn’t up yet.
I had a subscription to *Games *from its earlier issues through to the end of its first incarnation. The WMO puzzles were my greatest joy. At some point they printed a book of them, which I’ve gone through several times over the years. Guess it’s time to add the new ones to my collection.
Does anyone remember the first Christmas Look Alike puzzle created by Joan Steiner for GAMES-probably in 1983? Would love to have a copy of it again…
Since there are so many Games contributors and playtesters posting in this thread, I thought it would be a good place to ask for advice about a submission. I’ve prepared a new type of puzzle—at least, one which I don’t think Games or anyone else has printed before. I’ve produced several hundred of these puzzles, so I could pitch all of them to Kappa as a book, or I could just submit a handful to Games World of Puzzles. Of course, even if they are interested in the book, they might want to run a few puzzles in the magazine first in order to gauge/build interest. My dilemma is that their book and magazine operations are in different departments, and I have no idea how closely they work. So which of the following would be best to do?
[ul]
[li]Submit a formal book proposal to the book department.[/li][li]Submit a few individual puzzles to the magazine department, and if they’re accepted, submit a book proposal to the book department.[/li][li]Submit a few individual puzzles to the magazine department, mentioning that I have a few hundred more and asking for a referral to the book department.[/li][li]Address a single letter to both departments which contains both a submission to the magazine and a proposal for the book department.[/li][li]Something else…?[/li][/ul]
My dad subscribed to Games in the 80s and 90s. Much of it was over my head when I was younger of course, but it helped build my love for puzzles and games. Is there perhaps a junior version? I wonder if my kids would be interested.
psychonaut, I’ll let the experts answer you, I just wanted to join in the chorus of praises.
I wouldn’t worry too much about giving kids games-related books and magazines meant for adults. When I was a kid most of the puzzles and riddles I encountered were from publications targetted at adults. Like you, I found most of this material to be over my head, but it didn’t really bother me. I just skipped over the stuff I didn’t understand and maybe came back to it in a few years once I could make sense of it.
I’m currently writing for a new children’s magazine which is about languages and linguistics in general, and it has a heavy emphasis on language games. If you think your kids might be interested in it I can post the details here or send them by private message.
Oh, good grief, Maltby’s *Harper’s *Puzzles are infuriating. Not impossible, just messy.
The ones in Games are probably cleaner, or they used to be.
We had a big pile of Games magazines starting from when I was pretty young. The great thing was that I could try the 1-star puzzles as a wee lad, then years later I could look through the back issues doing the 2-star puzzles, then later I could finish off the 3-star puzzles.
nm
And then there’s the joy of finding a two- or three-star puzzle that’s just particularly well-suited to your aptitudes, and being able to finish it when you “shouldn’t” have.
Slightly off topic, is Games having distribution problems? I no longer subscribe after having been cut off in the middle once too often, but used to pick up an issue in airport magazine stores when I traveled. The last two times none were there. Just Dell stuff.
For a while, they had a kids’ page, but I’m not aware of anything more than that.
As others have said, the regular version is pretty family friendly and inoffensive. I, like many dopers, started reading it in about 5th grade. I did the 1-stars first, and anything with photos, maps, or cartoons. I moved on to more difficult puzzles as I got older.
I stopped subscribing several years ago when the cost went up and my available time went down. I was only finishing 3 or 4 puzzles per magazine and it just wasn’t worth it.
I will have to look around for the new merged version. Barnes and Noble has always been good in the past.
I had a subscription to Games starting way back in the late 70s all the way through to the 90s. Broke my heart that I threw out a huge stack of them about 15 years ago.
I loved the Pic Tac Toe puzzles, and always wanted to submit one, but could never pull it together.
Do “messy” and “cleaner” refer to the cryptic clues themselves? As in not always being a combination of wordplay + definition? Or, there was a patch in Harper’s, of a few years, when it seemed like every puzzle had one or more typos in the clues, though the puzzles were still ultimately solvable. Over the years I have solved just about all of the Harper’s cryptics, including the Galli and Maltby years. Some of the puzzles are more enjoyable than others, with for example ones using a Playfair square tending to be tedious for me. A subscription to the magazine with online access makes it possible to have a complete set of its cryptics from 1976 onward. I find that the more familiar that I am with a puzzle creator’s cluing style, the easier that the puzzles become. Lately, the Harper’s and Games variety cryptics are easy to solve.
Speaking of Games, the latest issue that I have is April 2015, which arrived in about February. Yes, the Pic Tac Toe puzzles are clever and fun. So is Some Assembly Required, by Patrick Berry. I’ve avoided the Paint by Numbers because they look tedious with a final and crude boxy picture not worth the effort. However, if solving PbN’s leads to better results than using one weird trick to boost my credit score by 217 points, then I’ll start painting now.
I think I have seen typos and other errors in Maltby’s, yeah.
“Messy” refers to his kind of trippy clues and weird extra grid entry rules. And he uses nonstandard spellings and obscure words on top of weirdly complex grid rules. Yeah, that’s the point, it’s meant to be hard. And he’s not quite Kinsey Millhone’s landlord. But I very found him more annoying than, say, the team that used to a puzzle in the Atlantic.
As I did more of his puzzles, I got used to him, though.