Games Magazine

Games Magazine, a magazine dedicated to games and puzzles, was originally published by Playboy. The magazine debuted in 1977 and was sold to another company in 1987. After it was sold, the magazine briefly went out of business before coming back in 1991 and changing hands multiple times since. The version published from 1977-1987 is the one I’m most familiar with.

Each issue of Games contained several different kinds of puzzles, and the magazine itself was divided into color (glossy) pages with a black and white (newsprint) section in the middle. The newsprint pages contained traditional “pencil” puzzles — things like crossword puzzles, word searches, and other logic puzzles. The color pages contained all sorts of visual puzzles. One of my favorite recurring puzzles were the Eyeball Benders, which contained close-up pictures of objects for readers to try and identify.

My dad subscribed to Games Magazine for many years, so growing up we always had old issues laying around our house. I remember taking copies to school; some of my teachers even photocopied puzzles from the issues I brought for other students to work. Each puzzle had a difficulty rating, but I seem to remember even the easy ones were pretty challenging.

One of my favorite memories of Games Magazine was that each issue of the magazine contained a fake advertisement. Sometimes they were large full-page ads and sometimes they would be small ads tucked away in the back of the magazine. I loved flipping through each issue and searching for the fake ads, although in retrospect that was a pretty good way to get readers to look at all the real ones, too.

Over the years, lots of people have scanned lots of magazines and uploaded them to lots of places on the internet. Unfortunately, I’ve never found a good stash of Games Magazines online. Part of the problem comes from the magazine’s generic title. I often joke that bands like Live, The Who, and The The could only have existed in a pre-internet world. Searches for “Games Magazine” turns up lots of hits for many different magazines that featured games, but not this one.

A couple of times a year, when I think about it, I check eBay for vintage copies of the magazine. The going price seems to be around $10/copy (including shipping) which is too much for me, but recently I found (and won) an auction with eight issue that cost me just under $3/issue. The magazines only cost $1.50 new, but considering inflation, I guess that’s not too bad.

I plan to scan all the issues and make them available, but haven’t had the time to do them all yet. Here’s one, in case you want to take a look at one. You can view it online, save it, or even print it out if you want to work some of the old puzzles.

Games Magazine (1982.03-04).pdf