The Daily Worker Placement

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Holiday Contest Answers

by | published Monday, December 24, 2018

I grew up admiring (and occasionally entering) GAMES Magazine’s contests. They required persistence, mental flexibility, and (especially in the pre-Internet era) both an encyclopedic knowledge and the resourcefulness to know where to look stuff up when that knowledge failed you. And the satisfaction of finishing one was always sweeeeeeet. To be perfectly candid, I pretty well ripped off an actual GAMES contest–several of them, in fact. For every December issue, they used to publish a “best of the year” issue and the cover would always be a visual mash-up of the games and the contest would require readers to deconstruct and/or decode it. 

I knew I wanted to start by challenging people to identify bits from the games; the challenge was thinking up another challenge to layer on top of that. Using the initial letters of the games was an obvious idea–but what to do with them? Somehow the idea of related words with a game-related theme floated to the surface, and after dismissing a couple of ideas I came to the railroads from Monopoly. Three of them were decently-sized words (or, in one case, a phrase) which wouldn’t necessarily be easy to unscramble. And, by releasing them one word at a time starting with “Reading” it wouldn’t be obvious what the common thread was until the final stage (especially since the letters in “Reading” and “Short Line” had many possible anagrams). 

Finding the games to make up the individual clues was harder than I expected. I had to find games that were well-enough known but not too easy overall–or at least, components which had bits where the name of the game could be deduced, such as the apple from Newton. By the way, I now know that relatively few games start with “N” (except in the wargaming world, where there are plenty of Napoleon games, but I wanted to avoid anything that obscure).  

And so to the answers: 

Week One:  

Reef 

Escape! 

Alhambra 

Deep Sea Adventure 

Imperial Settlers 

No Thanks! 

Great Western Railroad 

Week Two: 

Survive! 

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle 

Oh My Goods! 

Robo Rally 

Tiny Epic Zombies 

London 

Imagine 

Newton 

Ex Libris 

Week Three: 

Power Grid 

Eclipse 

Nations: the Dice Game 

Nautillion 

Scythe 

Yamatai 

Legends of Andor 

Vast 

Azul 

Nemo’s War 

I’m the Boss 

Acquire 

And the contest answer is: B&O! Stay tuned for the winner announcement tomorrow! 

Author

  • David W.

    David is the Managing Editor of the DWP. He learned chess at the age of five and has been playing tabletop games ever since. His collection currently consists of about 600 games, which take up way too much space. His game "Odd Lots" won the inaugural TABS Game Design Contest in 2008. He is currently Managing Editor of The Daily Worker Placement. All in all he's pretty smug about his knowledge of games and game design.

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4 thoughts on “Holiday Contest Answers

  1. Matt Hoevenaars says:

    Who won the contest?

  2. Kaiwen Zhang says:

    you meant resistance and not robo rally right?

  3. Matt Hoevenaars says:

    Still haven’t seen who won. I’m guessing I didn’t since I never heard from you guys 😛

  4. […] so, I put together our first Non-Denominational Contest five years ago very much in the spirit of GAMES Magazine, whose puzzles, articles, and contests I […]

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