Word games in Japanese (similar to Newspaper games in English?)

Question

I am a big fan of what I would call "word games" that are often found in English newspapers like crosswords, cryptograms, scrambled word games, etc.

Usually games like these somehow involve overlapping letters of perpendicular words, rearranging letters to form a word, or something similar.

I wanted to know if there are similar common games in Japanese, not necessarily found in a newspaper. I found Shiritori which is kind of similar where the last (relevant) mora of a word is used to start the next word, and so on.

Does there exist a poem that uses direction to change its meaning? The comments/answers in this post may point to these not being common.

Answer 1

I wanted to know if there are similar common games in Japanese

There are several of such games in Japanese.

[言葉遊び]｛ことばあそ｝, literally "word play", might be the word you are looking for. Notice that this is connected exactly to "word play" in English, if you read the article in another language.

In this article you can see many representative games, among which anagrams, ambigrams, etc.

Some popular Japanese word games are しりとり, which you mention as well, a Japanese version of Fictionary called たほいや, and 語呂{ごろ}合{あ}わせ。The latter also have a an English wikipedia article, from which I quote:

Goroawase (語呂合わせ) is an especially common form of Japanese wordplay whereby homophonous words are associated with a given series of letters, numbers or symbols, in order to associate a new meaning with that series. The new words can be used to express a superstition about certain letters or numbers. More commonly, however, goroawase is used as a mnemonic technique, especially in the memorization of numbers such as dates in history, scientific constants, and phone numbers.

EDIT:

Reading your comments, it seems you want to know if games such as crosswords exist in Japanese. They do, there is even this website as an online reference. Unless I still don' understand your question.

Answer 2

The Wikipedia page has examples of tons of similar games. Then there are なぞなぞ, that is riddles, which play with the meanings of the words. Here's one list, although you can basically find an unlimited supply on google.

I guess something like 文字パズル or possibly 単語パズル could be closer to what you're referring to. I'm not aware of any formal term for a game like this, though.