The Games and Puzzles Journal

The journal was originally published in printed form, with a long break between the two series.
Volume 1, issues 1 - 12, 1987 - 1989.
Volume 2, issues 13 - 18, 1996 - 2000.
These are now available as PDFs, and can be downloaded from the Publications page of this website, where further details are given.

From 2001 the journal was published on-line, and no longer distributed in printed form.

All the issues have now (4 June 2013) been reconstructed here:
• issue 19 Alternating tours with contributions by Donald Knuth
• issue 20 Miscellaneous items on tours and esoterica
• issue 21 Celtic tours
• issue 22 Dissections by Tom Marlow and 6×6 semimagic tours by Awani Kumar
• issue 23 Directions, Calendar, Space Compass
• issue 24 Near-perfect magic knight tours 12×12 by Awani Kumar
• issue 25 New work on magic knight tours by Tom Marlow and Tim Roberts
• issue 26 Diagonal magic 12×12 tours by Awani Kumar. Emperor tours by George Jelliss
• issue 27 In the Footsteps of Eratosthenes by George Jelliss. Automorphic Cubes by Tom Marlow
• issue 28 Peg solitaire edited by J. D. Beasley, with: solutions
• issue 29 Circling the Squares by George Jelliss [UPDATE 23 July 2014]
• issue 30 Puzzle Issue, with eight contributors
• issue 31 Solutions to the Puzzle Issue
• issue 32 Magic Knight Tours 12×12 with cyclic and diagonal properties by Awani Kumar
• issue 33 Rectangle-Square Dissections by Chris Tylor
• issue 34 Chess piece arrangement problems, with appendix
• issue 35 Squaring the Square by T. H. Willcocks
• issue 36 Triangular Peg Solitaire by George Bell
• issue 37 Chess piece arrangement problems, riders in unguard
• issue 38 Chess piece arrangement problems, coverings with one type of piece
• issue 39 Chess piece arrangement problems, multiple pieces
• issue 40 Chess piece arrangement problems, the eight officers
• issue 41 Diamond Solitaire by George Bell
• issue 42 Magic Tours, Polyhedra and other puzzles by A. Kumar, T. Marlow and G. Jelliss
• issue 43 Knight's Tours in Three Dimensions by Awani Kumar, with separate page of diagrams
• issue 44 Polyomino Covering of Surfaces by Jacques Haubrich.
• issue 45 Miscellaneous: Non-intesecting knight paths, Pythagorean Triplets, 16×16 Diagonal magic knight tour. [UPDATE 28 March 2022 - 20×20 tour]

There is also a more detailed list of contents in the style of the original index page for the journal.

Those interested in Sudoku (cf issue 42) may like to try one by Arto Inkala which is said to be "the most challenging possible". See: Arto_Inkala_Sudoku or worlds-hardest-sudoku.

About Changes to these Pages

Regrettably my old Games and Puzzles Journal site which was on a service called "connectfree" has been closed down (I first noticed this on 8 May 2013), so the link, which was "http://gpj.connectfree.co.uk/index.htm" no longer works. I have been expecting this to happen for several years, parts of the site having disappeared earlier. The site was set up in 2001 and ran until 2006, but then with a change to broadband connection I did not have dial-up access to the site, so was unable to update it.

With this is mind I kept back-up copies of most of the files on my computer, so have been able to reconstruct them here. However the figures for Issue 43, which were originally produced as an excel file and are shown on a separate page, were missing. Fortunately the author Awani Kumar had saved a copy from the connectfree site and has sent it to me.

Due to other computer problems the work that was done to produce the last issue, Number 45, was lost. However in April 2010 I recovered three of the articles that were to appear in it. Accordingly this is offered in the link above. It may eventually be possible to put together some other material. My apologies to Alexander Fischer, Laszlo Koltai and S. K. Singh for the delay in publishing their contributions.

If this site should go missing again, it can be recovered from the "Wayback Machine" web.archive.org: copy in gpj.connectfree.co.uk/index.htm following the "http://" prompt, click on "Take Me Back", and go back to the calendar for 2012 and click on one of the dates highlighted there. [Incidentally the whole Mayhematics site is similarly preserved in the archive should it disappear!]

The notes about my orthodox chess play are now in the section on Games.