"Does anyone still play play-by-mail games?" Topic

Years ago I used to play in a LOTR campaign conquest game, and there used to be many of these sorts of kingdom/conquest games that were played via snail mail with biweekly turns. Do these still get played? I never see anything about them anymore, and when you find internet pages you cannot always tell if they are still active.

I'm pretty sure Hyborian War is still going.

That concept is so old school it's almost punk rock.

I played with a buddy of mine while he was doing time in prison.

That was few years ago and haven't had a need to since then.

My dad and I still play classic Avalon Hill hex & counter games that way, but by email rather than snail-mail.

Diplomacy is a great game to play by email. I haven't played for a while but Dipbounced.com was a really good site for it which I would recommend.

Why would anyone play a game in this way when we have e-mail ? I have played play by e-mail games of this type (a good one was called Medieval Diplomacy) but I can't see that anyone would still play by post.

Well, I know that classic boardgames are better played with the electronic supplements and such, so I wasn't really talking about them--I was thinking about the commercially-run big games that usually involved dozens of players all sending in turns to the company/moderator, usually campaign/conquest type games.

I found my LOTR game book and materials the other day in my hobby area and it brought back a wave of nostalgia. Playing a similar game against an AI on the computer, despite stunning graphics, just isn't the same.

Why would anyone play a game in this way when we have e-mail ?

Email? That's like last century's online asynchronous play?

No. But I'm still in a punk rock band.

Like Oddball, I once played by mail with a friend in prison, back in the 90s. He and I played two games of the original Axis & Allies board game; I was beaten both times.

That was the only time I ever played by mail.

What about computer moderated games like Starweb from Flying Buffalo? Are those still around?

I am doing play by e-mail w/digital photos.
Works pretty well

I'm guessing using VASSAL and other computer assisted games via email (PBEM) is the equivalent of play by mail (PBM) now?

For what Rwphillipsstl is asking they are probably using online forums now to run games…maybe you can trying searching for something like that? (pretty sure I've run across a few over the years)

I used to play Diplomacy by mail a lot.
I also did a lot of Avalon Hill games, particularly Bulge.

I'm still playing "de Profundis – letters from the abyss"

Play Nuclear Destruction (Flying Buffalo) every now and then. Problem is too few players, thus few games and the same players in the games.

Dan

I used to RUN, commercially, several Play-by-Mail games back in the 80's. They were commercially a small success, game-wise somewhat better but hard to do and hard to coordinate. I've played in several myself (Tribes of Crane and others). The satisfaction factor fades off pretty quickly over time.

By all reckonings they SHOULD be pretty good and quite entertaining, but they aren't.

I haven't played a PBM game since the mid 90s, or a PBEM game since the early noughties.

The longest play by mail game I played a large multi-player game covering the Napoleonic Wars, it was real time in that orders were sent every two weeks which covered two weeks of game time. It lasted for seven years until the French players all pretty much drifted away, but as Paris was under siege at the time, it seemed like a good place to stop.

Notable partly for the Russian Empire in the Low Countries, ahem. For some bizarre reason I was really good at naval combat, and the Imperial Russian navy swept all before it, which gave our army considerable strategic mobility. Invading Austria turned out to be a bad move though.

Hyborian War can . I was in one of the first games. I built a massive Pictish army and I conquered half the world. But then they closed down for a year and when things got going again, my army units defected and I lost Pictland to some third rate country because they decided to change the rules.
I almost got a lawyer.