How to remove gnome-games package without removing other packages?

For Debian and spinoffs, after you login to Gnome hit CtrlAltF1 and get to a console window.

Login as root OR yourself then sudo su (different distros get stupid about root, sudo and su).

Type apt-get remove gnome-games without quotes and press Enter- it will say its getting rid of gnome and gnome-games - choose Yes or OK - it will mark them all for removal.

Then type apt-get install gnome-core and choose Yes to install it will mark gnome-core to stay and show you all the game apps that are no longer in use and can be auto removed.

Then type apt-get autoremove and you should see all the game data about to be blasted out and your ready to go - no baloney, no removing entire gnome etc.

apt-get clean or apt-get autoclean can get you some disk space from cached install files.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto

It appears that all of those were automatically installed as dependencies of the gnome metapackage. As you said, the gnome metapackage is incomplete without the gnome-games package, so it must be removed. That renders all the packages listed unused and so aptitude wants to remove them. There may be a way to remove gnome without removing its unused dependencies, but a quick search didn't show one and I suspect that it would try to uninstall them every time you removed something else. Your best bet is probably to figure out which of those packages you explicitly want and mark them manually installed, then let it uninstall the remainder if they're still unneeded.