A
word puzzle that appears frequently in
GAMES Magazine.
A way of presenting hangman as a puzzle that can be done by one person instead of having to have an opponent or emcee who knows the answer.
The way it works is that you have a set of blanks for each of several words, and a letter grid. In the letter grid, for each letter of the alphabet and each puzzle, there is a number (from 1-100 in GAMES). Then, there is a second grid where the meaning of each number is presented (either "not in word" or one or more positions within the word where that letter appears).
As long as the puzzles are presented in short sets, this level of hiding which letters are in the word is generally enough that the grids won't give away the word when you are looking for other letters, but not too much work to look up the letters you are "testing".
Of course, you have to be honest with yourself or it won't be much fun. Mark off all those limbs on the hanged man for letters you looked up which are not in the word.
This could have been based on the Hangman game that was one of the more popular varieties of the invisible ink books popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In these puzzles you had the same setup as in solitaire hangman, but instead of the extra grid to disguise the results for each letter, they were printed in invisible ink that was revealed when you filled in a box with a special marker. Each word was a separate game with its own grid, etc., and it was essentially self-scoring based on the number of not-in-word letters you have revealed results for in the letter box.