Reminiscing old Games Magazine contests

The Game Room
1

Something over in Cafe Society made me think about the contests that ran (and still do) in Games Magazine. I am not necessarily talking about ones run regularly like the annual Rebus Contest or the occasional Scavenger Hunt, but if you want to mention those, go right ahead.

Two immediately spring to mind as noteworthy.
First, there was one at the end of 1979 that asked readers to send in a prediction for 1980, and the three that were considered the least likely to happen but did would win an expensive crystal ball (Tiffany, I think). IIRC, the three winning predictions were:

  1. No Americans would win gold medals at the 1980 Summer Olympics; this was before the USSR invaded Afghanistan, which would prompt President Carter to call for the boycott, although it is possible that whoever said it remembered that the USSR vetoed a UN Security Council resolution aimed at Iran after it took Americans hostage in late 1978.
  2. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would be President and Vice-President. Picking Reagan wasn’t much of a longshot - he nearly got the Republican nomination in 1976, and double-digit inflation was hurting Carter badly - but nobody really had Bush on the radar until the announcement was made.
  3. Mount St. Helens would erupt.

The other one was a contest where you sent in an integer from 1 to 1,000,000, which was actually two contests: one was won by the person with the lowest number that nobody else sent in, and the other was drawn from all of the entries with the number closest to the average of all of the entered numbers without going over. One other difference from normal was the prize; each contest’s prize was the winning number in dollars, multiplied or divided by 10 as many times as necessary to be between 100 and 999.99, except that if the winning number was 1,000,000, the prize was $10,000. The two most popular numbers were 1 (“nobody is going to enter 1, so I’ll win”) and 1,000,000.
One small problem: the rules said that the numbers had to be sent in either on the back of an envelope or a stamped postcard. However, at the time, you could buy postcards from USPS with the postage printed on them, which, by a strict reading of the rules, made the cards ineligible. As a result, each contest had two winners determined; one if they included these, and one if they did not.

Okay, I’ll throw in something from one of the Scavenger Hunts: one of them had “a newspaper clipping of a weather forecast map that includes the borders of (some African country - I want to say Uganda) on it.” One person asked a columnist at their local paper to draw one in his next column, which he did, even though the forecast on the map was fairly nonsensical, and it was sent in - and that was the only one that had one, so that person won. The magazine had to explain why they accepted it; it was along the lines of, “While we did ask for a forecast map, we never said how accurate it had to be.”

2

The one time I found the HIdden Contest, it was a weird image puzzle titled God’s First Words. Holding the page up to the light revealed “You have found the hidden contest! Send us something see through!”.

3

I love that number one, and I might run it for my students, with the prize being a number of Hershey’s Kisses (or other small chocolates) between 1 and 10, with a possibility for 100.

4

Ones I remember:

  • a logic puzzle (with a bunch of different statements) where you had to determine if seeing a mermaid would give you a hangover
  • a limerick contest that was supposed to focus on more recent (i.e. '80s vintage) topics like Jane Fonda or Ed Meese
  • a contest for the best clerihew (which I had never heard of before or since)

And of course there was always an ad for the Benson & Hedges 100s sweepstakes, where you could win 100 of something (e.g. 100 minutes in a hot air balloon, or 100 lbs of exercise equipment).

5

There was the Celebrity Palindrome Contest. The editors said many entries were “Oh no! Don Ho!” The winner was “Lisa Bonet ate no basil”. That Palindrome appears in Weird Al’s Bob.

6

GAMES had a contest where you had to come up with the longest possible word using only four consonants. A few other people apparently joined high-school me in sending in the best answer: SESQUIQUINQUENNIALLY.

However, they deemed this wasn’t acceptable, possibly since it wasn’t in whatever dictionary they were using. The winning entry was, as above, without the first two syllables.

7

I remember that one - somebody also tried entering QUASIQUINQUENNIALLY (“about every five years or so”).

I’ll explain how the contest actually worked, for the rest of you: it was a dart-themed contest, with each consonant except Y given a point value from 1 to 20; the rarer the letter, the higher its value. You had four darts; each one let you use a particular consonant up to three times. You could use the same consonant 4-6 times, but you had to use two darts for it. If you didn’t need all three (and “quinquennially” did not), each dart you didn’t use scored a 50-point bullseye. You can use as many of A,E,I,O,U,Y as you wanted. Your score was the sum of the point values of the letters (A, E, I, O, U, Y counted zero) multiplied by the length of the word.

For those of you wondering, sesquinquennially supposedly means “every 7 1/2 years.”

8

I didn’t feel the need to go into so much extra detail. They did have some good poetry contests.

9

My very favorite, similar, contest was one that challenged readers to write short stories using only three-letter words. Some of the details of the winner are still stuck in my head: it was about “Our Man Ron, Old Ray Gun”, and his adventures fighting against “Bad Tip” (Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill).

10

I also remember a Higgledy Piggledy poem contest. E.g.:

Higgledy piggledy
Senator Kennedy
Please list the virtues of
President Ron.

Amiability…
Amiability…
Amiability…
Need I go on?

11

I think they ran a contest once to create a mnemonic for some new or trivial bit of data. The only one that I remember (don’t know if it was an example they gave, or an entry that someone sent in) was for the last names of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands.

I’ve heard those called Double Dactyls, and Games may have been the first place I ran across them. I still remember

HIggledy Piggledy
Sergei Rachmaninov
Wrote his concertos for
Handspans like wings

Few, realistically,
Can, pianistically,
Digitalistically
Play the damn things

I’ve written a few of my own over the years.

12

Last night, a word sprang into my mind: Calculatrivia! It was a series of contests involving trivia questions with numerical answers that you would plug into a giant formula to come up with a one-number answer. Some of the questions were hard in the pre-Google era! If you want to try your hand at one, see below (don’t peek at the answers!):
https://www.pleacher.com/mp/puzzles/mathpuz/mobcal3.html

13

Buz buz.

14

I did that as a contest with a bunch of third and fourth graders a number of years back, inspired by the Games contest. I think I had everybody submit three numbers. Some kids really got into it, strategizing mightily, while others were just along for the ride. I do remember someone’s dad asking me what the educational value of this was. I think I talked at him about it for ten minutes, give or take. He never asked me that question again.

15

New York magazine did the double dactyls contest back in 1969 or 1970. I had a book that was a compilation of the results from their contests (it was called Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise, based on an entry in their “Unlikely Greeting Cards” contest).

I remember a surprising number of their contest entries for the double dactyls, including

Higgledy Piggledy
Yale University
Gave up misogyny
Opened its door.

Coeducational
Extracurricular
Heterosexual
Fun is in store.

16

They ran at least one contest to create a “Scrabblegram” - a piece of writing using only the letters on the 100 tiles in a Scrabble set, including the blanks. The winner was a limerick:

A clown jumps above a trapeze,
Arcs over one-eighty degrees,
Out into mid-air,
Quite unaware
Of his exiting billfold and keys.

17

That is awesome, and I can completely imagine that conversation.

18

I especially remember two of the last three, as the planned answer was a positive integer, but because of a mistake made in a question, one had an answer that included a fraction with something like a 6-digit denominator, and the other was something like the sixth root of a 6-digit number.
One of them asked, “At the beginning of most episodes of The Simpsons, what is the amount that appears on the cash register when Maggie is scanned?” (The answer at the time was 847.63, although a number of people entered “4” as there made a joke in one episode claiming that it said “NRA4EVER”.) The producers complained that they received a considerable number of calls asking this question. Some people also thought to ask this on the old alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup; we replied, “We’ll tell you after you tell us (insert another one of the questions here).”

Another contest I remember: the contest where they had to fudge the rules just to have one valid entry. You had to send in a newspaper clipping featuring “tombstoning” - that is, two headlines side-by-side on the same page that mean something entirely different when read across the width of the page. The problem was, pretty much every newspaper in the country is wise to this sort of thing, so the closest thing they got to a valid entry was one where the two headlines were at the tops of adjacent pages.

19

I love this one!

In 1983, Games magazine ran a contest titled “Do You Clerihew?” The winning entry was:

Did Descartes
Depart
With the thought
“Therefore I’m not”?

20

It was awesome, and very satisfying! He said something about the assignment being “basically” just writing down random numbers, and oh my heavens did I have fun with that!

Two other “contests,” from an April issue:

“Mind Your Ps and Qs (and count the number of them in this issue)”

“Whoever sends us the most money wins”