| A magazine devoted to puzzles and games.
Puzzles dominate, as evidenced by the Pencilwise section which has ranged from 16 to 32 pages over the years. Pencilwise consists of crosswords, other word and number puzzles, visual puzzles, etc. The rest of the magazine contains other puzzles -- often ones which require color pictures or are more story-like in nature.
Games show up in the form of game reviews, including an annual compilation of the year's 100 best games, but also in stories about games, a calendar of game-related events, and on occasion a game printed right in the magazine that you can play.
GAMES also runs a lot of contests, which range from "solve this and submit the answer as an entry, winners picked by random draw" (a variant of this is the hidden contest, where "solve this" is replaced with "find it") to extreme tests of skill in word games, logic puzzles, etc., where the best score wins. Kyle Corbin is a bit of a legend among long-time GAMES readers with his considerable success in word-building contests.
GAMES began in the late 1970s, initially published by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Enterprises, but was soon sold and has since gone through several changes of ownership. Likewise, it has gone through several changes of publication frequency, from bimonthly to monthly to bimonthly again, to "9 issues a year" in 2000 (which ended up actually coming out to 9 issues, but irregularly and more frequent toward the end of the year), to 10 issues a year in 2001, and it even stopped publication for about a year once when one of its owners went bankrupt (from other ventures; GAMES was financially sound).
In recent years, the popularity of the puzzles has led GAMES to launch two additional all-puzzle magazines: GAMES World of Puzzles and GAMES World of Crosswords.
| 
