Remember When Multiplayer Gaming Needed Envelopes and Stamps?

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Once a sprawling industry, play-by-mail (PBM) games have been rendered an afterthought in gaming history by the internet, but they’re still clinging to life.

magazine, and played from the early ‘80s until 1993. He returned in 2018, because while his hectic work schedule had made it difficult to have lengthy board game sessions with friends, PBM could be played in spare moments while still engaging his love of long-term planning and diplomacy. He’s now active in seven different games.with friends, Zachary explains that they “excel at large-scale, strategic, diplomatic endeavors that are not achievable in board or computer games.

That fits Landes’ design philosophy. “The strength of a game is not in playing it,” he explains. “It’s in how much the player thinks about it when they are not playing. It’s all about that ‘What if” scenario that occurs like a light bulb going off, and causes them to want to return to the game to see the results of their insight.

It’s worth reemphasizing the timespan these emotions unfold over. Zachary recounted a Middle-Earth PBM that saw him suffer early defeats at the hands of his Nazgul opponents before he slowly rebuilt and helped his team turn the tide over the course of a victory that took. Charles, the mononymous co-moderator of PlayByMail.net, noted that while the emotional ups and downs are one of PBM’s best aspects, winning itself is often secondary.

Charles learned about PBM around 1987 by delivering magazines and comic books that advertised them. He eventually gave them a shot, and he’s been hooked ever since. While he enjoys games of all varieties, he said that “looking in my mailbox and seeing turn results in there is as good of a feeling today as it first was for me more than thirty years ago. People who are sick and tired of the internet might just find that they would enjoy receiving turn results in their mailboxes also.

 

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Was this your childhood xirclebox 😂

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