A play-by-mail game (also known as a PBM game, PBEM game, turn-based game, turn based distance game, or an interactive strategy game.) is a game played through postal mail, email or other digital media. Correspondence chess and Go were among the first PBM games. Diplomacy has been played by mail since 1963, introducing a multi-player aspect to PBM games. Flying Buffalo Inc. pioneered the first commercially available PBM game in 1970. A small number of PBM companies followed in the 1970s, with an explosion of hundreds of startup PBM companies in the 1980s at the peak of PBM gaming popularity, many of them small hobby companies—more than 90 percent of which eventually folded. A number of independent PBM magazines also started in the 1980s, including The Nuts & Bolts of PBM, Gaming Universal, Paper Mayhem and Flagship. These magazines eventually went out of print, replaced in the 21st century by the online PBM journal Suspense and Decision.
Play-by-mail games (which became known as turn-based games in the digital age) have a number of advantages and disadvantages compared to other kinds of gaming. PBM games have wide ranges for turn lengths. Some games allow turnaround times of a day or less—even hourly. Other games structure multiple days or weeks for players to consider moves or turns and players never run out of opponents to face. If desired, some PBM games can be played for years. Additionally, the complexity of PBM games can be far beyond that allowed by a board game in an afternoon, and pit players against live opponents in these conditions—a challenge some players enjoy. PBM games allow the number of opponents or teams in the dozens—with some previous examples over a thousand players. PBM games also allow gamers to interact with others globally. Games with low turn costs compare well with expensive board or video games. Drawbacks include the price for some PBM games with high setup and/or turn costs, and the lack of the ability for face-to-face roleplaying. Additionally, for some players, certain games can be overly complex, and delays in turn processing can be a negative.
Play-by-mail games are multifaceted. In their earliest form they involved two players mailing each other directly by postal mail, such as in correspondence chess. Multi-player games, such as Diplomacy or more complex games available today, involve a game master who receives and processes orders and adjudicates turn results for players. These games also introduced the element of diplomacy in which participants can discuss gameplay with each other, strategize and form alliances. In the 1970s and 1980s, some games involved turn results adjudicated completely by humans. Over time, partial or complete turn adjudication by computer became the norm. Games also involve open- and closed-end variants. Open-ended games do not normally end and players can develop their positions to the fullest extent possible; in closed-end games, players pursue victory conditions until a game conclusion. PBM games enable players to explore a diverse array of roles, such as characters in fantasy or medieval settings, space opera, inner city gangs, or more unusual ones such as assuming the role of a microorganism or a monster.
History
The earliest play-by-mail games developed as a way for geographically separated gamers to compete with each other using postal mail. Chess and Go are among the oldest examples of this.McLain 1993 In these two-player games, players sent moves directly to each other. Multi-player games emerged later: Diplomacy is an early example of this type, emerging in 1963, in which a central game master manages the game, receiving moves and publishing adjudications.Babcock 2013. p. 16. According to Shannon Appelcline, there was some PBM play in the 1960s, but not much.Appelcline 2014. loc. 2353. For example, some wargamers began playing Stalingrad by mail in this period.
In the early 1970s, in the United States, Rick Loomis, of Flying Buffalo Inc., began a number of multi-player play-by-mail games;Loomis 2013. p. 38. these included games such as Nuclear Destruction, which launched in 1970.Rick Loomis PBM. This began the professional PBM industry in the United States.McLain 1993. Professional game moderation started in 1971 at Flying Buffalo which added games such as Battleplan, Heroic Fantasy, Starweb, and others, which by the late 1980s were all computer moderated.Townsend 1988. p. 20.
For approximately five years, Flying Buffalo was the single dominant company in the US PBM industry until Schubel & Son entered the field in roughly 1976 with the human-moderated Tribes of Crane. Schubel & Son introduced fee structure innovations which allowed players to pay for additional options or special actions outside of the rules. For players with larger bankrolls, this provided advantages and the ability to game the system. The next big entrant was Superior Simulations with its game Empyrean Challenge in 1978. Reviewer Jim Townsend asserted that it was "the most complex game system on Earth" with some large position turn results 1,000 pages in length.
Chris Harvey started the commercial PBM industry in the United Kingdom with a company called ICBM.Harvey 2003. p. 26.Palmer 2003. p. 4. After Harvey played Flying Buffalo's Nuclear Destruction game in the United States in approximately 1971, Rick Loomis suggested that he run the game in the UK with Flying Buffalo providing the computer moderation. ICBM Games led the industry in the UK as a result of this proxy method of publishing Flying Buffalo's PBM games, along with KJC games and Mitregames.
In the early 1980s, the field of PBM players was growing.Harvey 1984. p. 21. Individual PBM game moderators were plentiful in 1980.The Space Gamer 1980. p. 13. However, the PBM industry in 1980 was still nascent: there were still only two sizable commercial PBM companies, and only a few small ones.Popolizio, Leblanc, and Popolizio 1990. p. 8. The most popular PBM games of 1980 were Starweb and Tribes of Crane.
Some players, unhappy with their experiences with Schubel & Son and Superior Simulations, launched their own company—Adventures by Mail—with the game, Beyond the Stellar Empire, which became "immensely popular". In the same way, many people launched PBM companies, trying their hand at finding the right mix of action and strategy for the gaming audience of the period. According to Jim Townsend: In the late 70's and all of the 80's, many small PBM firms have opened their doors and better than 90% of them have failed. Although PBM is an easy industry to get into, staying in business is another thing entirely. Literally hundreds of PBM companies have come and gone, most of them taking the money of would-be-customers with them.
Townsend emphasized the risks for the PBM industry in that "The new PBM company has such a small chance of surviving that no insurance company would write a policy to cover them. Skydivers are a better risk."Townsend 1989. p. 55. W.G. Armintrout wrote a 1982 article in The Space Gamer magazine warning those thinking of entering the professional PBM field of the importance of playtesting games to mitigate the risk of failure.Armintrout 1982. pp. 31–32. By the late 1980s, of the more than one hundred play-by-mail companies operating, the majority were hobbies, not run as businesses to make money.Townsend 1988. p. 19. Townsend estimated that, in 1988, there were about a dozen profitable PBM companies in the United States—with an additional few in the United Kingdom and the same in Australia. Sam Roads of Harlequin Games similarly assessed the state of the PBM industry in its early days while also noting the existence of few non-English companies.
By the 1980s, interest in PBM gaming in Europe increased. The first UK PBM convention was in 1986.Mulholland 1989. p. 1. In 1993, the founder of Flagship magazine, Nick Palmer, stated that "recently there has been a rapid diffusion throughout continental Europe where now there are now thousands of players".Palmer 1993. In 1992, Jon Tindall stated that the number of Australian players was growing, but limited by a relatively small market base.Tindall 1992. p. 12. In a 2002 listing of 182 primarily European PBM game publishers and Zines, Flagship listed ten non-UK entries, to include one each from Austria and France, six from Germany, one from Greece and one from the Netherlands.Flagship Editors 2020. pp. 50–51.
PBM games up to the 1980s came from multiple sources: some were adapted from existing games and others were designed solely for postal play. In 1985, Pete Tamlyn stated that most popular games had already been attempted in postal play, noting that none had succeeded as well as Diplomacy.Tamlyn 19853. p. 33. Tamlyn added that there was significant experimentation in adapting games to postal play at the time and that most games could be played by mail. These adapted games were typically run by a gamemaster using a fanzine to publish turn results. The 1980s were also noteworthy in that PBM games designed and published in this decade were written specifically for the genre versus adapted from other existing games.Croft 1985. p. 41. Thus they tended to be more complicated and gravitated toward requiring computer assistance.
The proliferation of PBM companies in the 1980s supported the publication of a number of newsletters from individual play-by-mail companies as well as independent publications which focused solely on the play-by-mail gaming industry. As of 1983, The Nuts & Bolts of PBM was the primary magazine in this market. In July 1983, the first issue of Paper Mayhem was published. The first issue was a newsletter with a print run of 100.Webber 1987. p. 2. Flagship began publication in the United Kingdom in October 1983, the month before Gaming Universal's first issue was published in the United States. In the mid-1980s, general gaming magazines also began carrying articles on PBM and ran PBM advertisements. PBM games were featured in magazines like Games and Analog in 1984.McClain 1985. p. 38. In the early 1990s, Martin Popp also began publishing a quarterly PBM magazine in Sulzberg, Germany called Postspielbote.Flagship Editors 1992. p. 14. The PBM genre's two preeminent magazines of the period were Flagship and Paper Mayhem.Paduch 1993. p. RC21.
In 1984, the PBM industry created a Play-by-Mail Association.Gray 1985. p. 38. This organization had multiple charter members by early 1985 and was holding elections for key positions. One of its proposed functions was to reimburse players who lost money after a PBM business failed.
Paul Brown, the president of Reality Simulations, Inc., estimated in 1988 that there were about 20,000 steady play-by-mail gamers, with potentially another 10–20,000 who tried PBM gaming but did not stay.Dias 1988. p. 33. Flying Buffalo Inc. conducted a survey of 167 of its players in 1984. It indicated that 96% of its players were male with most in their 20s and 30s. Nearly half were white collar workers, 28% were students, and the remainder engineers and military.Loomis 1984. p. 4.