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n the section for 'unusual mediasubjects' we'd like to mention
 this, somewhat neglected, form of Ellery Queen content. We're talking 'games': from boardgames, puzzles to video based games.
Starting off in 1956 the Bettye:B company  (Broadway, NY) released a board game called (Ellery Queen's Great Mystery) Trapped. It featured a new 3d playing board. Which seems rather avant-garde but then again the 50s also brought us a 3D-hype in the movies. It wasn't the only time an Ellery Queen based board games reached gameplayers.

In 1971 3M had an immensely popular card game called Sleuth (later reissued by Avalon Hill) designed by Sid Sackson.  A jewel is missing, and you have to determine which one it is. You go about this pretty much in the same way Cluedo is played by asking about the hand your opponent is dealt and using the deductive methods of e.g. Mastermind. It's not widely known that this great card game originally started out as a board game put out four years earlier by Ideal, called "The Case of the Elusive Assassin: An Ellery Queen Mystery Game."  Sackson made use of a board which players maneuver around in order to get to specific squares that allow them to make specific inquiries. The map on the game board represents an area of a country divided into thirty six sectors. In one sector there is an assassin waiting to commit a terrible crime. Players move around the board only to adjacent sectors or they may remain in the sector they are in, collecting information, checking out sectors - and finally, by shrewd deduction, determining the position of the elusive assassin. It was certainly quite interesting, but not as elegant as Sleuth was. Ellery Queen Mystery Games with 'Case of the Elusive Assassin' (1967) was part of Ideal's Mystery Classics series, which also includes Sherlock Holmes (!) in  Murder on the Orient Express (1967), Sax Rohmer's  Fu Manchu's Hidden Hoard (1967) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1968) based on 'Ten Little Indians'.

In 1973 a Janus Mystery Jigsaw Puzzle appeared. It is featured an Ellery Queen story on the back of the box The Case of His Headless Highness. With over 500 interlocking pieces the puzzle's size is 15" x 22". The idea was to read the story on the back of the box, try solving the mystery before you did the jigsaw puzzle. Then you see the solution pictured in the finished puzzle.
                                           read the story here!

n 1986 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine also came forward
with a board game (Mayfair games inc.).The game came with a playing board and 5 mysteries could be played by up to 6 players. Regular supplemental casebooks would only add to the fun. One could even write a mystery to be used in the game. In the basic version of the game, detectives maneuver around the city discovering clues. All clues are read aloud, and the winner is the first player to correctly solve the crime. In the advanced version, there's much more strategy, and clues are kept secret, and can even  be hidden from other players. Other scenario's for this game were sold e.g. From the Casebook of  Dan Fortune by Michael Collins (1988) and From the Casebook of Nick Velvet; (#302, 1986). a scenario to challenge even experienced players. Nick Velvet is a man for hire, and people are anxious to hire him, to steal things. Things like an empty sugar packet, and a juggling pin. Something is going on, and players need to solve the mystery before something violent and lethal takes place. Velvet is off course one of the memorable characters created by Edward D. Hoch. 

We suspect it's from the 70s but there was a card game called Mystery Match .The card game for crime connoisseurs came in a box and featured  Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and all the usual suspects...

This softcover book titled: Mystery Plays: 8 Plays for the Classroom Based on Stories by Famous Writers. Includes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ellery Queen, Dashiel Hammett, O. Henry ... This book has reproducible pages of mystery plays for classroom grades 4-8.