I was a teenager in the early 1980s when I first discovered GAMES magazine. Like one of Arthur C. Clarke’s prehistoric monoliths, the magazine suddenly and unexpectedly appeared on the shelves of my local variety store, with the purpose of metamorphosing a casual puzzle enthusiast into a highly evolved puzzle expert. Like my ancestral australopithecines, I reached out to touch this irresistible artifact, and the rest, as they say, is history (or in the case of my teenage self, the future).
Throughout the decades that followed, my appreciation of puzzles