Do you play games in a play by email format, and if so what are you favorite games?
I moved across the world from my friends, and as a dad I don't have much time for gaming. I really enjoy the idea of play by email (PBEM) or cloud format games, and got into playing ranked Advance Wars by Web for a little while that goes in that format. I then stopped playing as much due to spending more time than I had set aside for gaming thinking through my turns to try and improve my ELO.
Sadly, I haven't been able to get my friends to buy into playing a game in this format yet, but I'm holding out hope that when my kids are older, and I have a bit more time to game regularly, I can start up a game in this format with some internet strangers.
What got me thinking of this topic was remembering that I had bought Shadow Empires for my birthday with a Steam Gift card my brother gave me after my oldest was born, and it has been sitting in my library with 8 minutes of gameplay since then. I know it support PBEM, and I think my friends would enjoy it if I could get them to give it a try.
I'd thought I'd see what my fellow Tilders think about this style of game.
Do you have a favorite game you play in this format?
Any long-running games that you've had going on with a group? I know games in this format can take years to finish.
Are there any games that you wish would adopt this format?
Anything else/stories you felt like sharing about this kind of games?
Diplomacy (the 1959 board game) is a game that was mostly PBEM for a very long time - I got into it just as that was tailing off and everything moved to purpose-built websites, though. It's really the perfect game for PBEM, since most of the gameplay is correspondence and the orders are all simultaneous, so there's no waiting for your turn to come around.
I've heard of a PBEM game of it that lasted a decade. I think that's mostly because it had very lax deadlines though :D
Before the internet it used to be Played By Mail a lot, which is something I find fascinating and want to try someday!
Play by mail is fascinating! I do miss receiving physical letters and there are a few people I'd love to keep in correspondence with using them, but international postage can add up quick. I love reading about the play by physical mail games that are still going after all these decades.
I've actually never played Diplomacy and I feel like I should check it out sometime.
Word of warning from someone who's "won" (tied on my terms) every one the handful of games of Diplomacy he's played - this game may make you feel miserable, especially if you win. It's hard to be a manipulative betrayer for an extended period of time!
Also be careful who you play with. Some people can end up taking things way too seriously/personally. The last time I played someone was getting pretty aggressive out of character...
Play by email is sort of a relic that's more in line with slow paced boardgames than the engagement battlepass multiplayer of today.
Keeping with the theme and the other responses, Axis & Allies online, also an adaptation of a boardgame, allows for 24h asynchronous play and will notify you when a move has been made.
24 hours is still a somewhat tight deadline, in the strictest sense of pbem, but should be well enough for online games.
Is that through an official client? I used to play Axis and Allies in person with my cousins and remember stumbling upon TripleA, which now I feel like I need to see if they'd be interested in an asynchronous game of it!
I agree with it being more of an older concept, but I feel like it fits so many turn based games well. I think I saw Dominions 5 & 6 supported it natively and I had a friend who was really big on those games who would probably be down to play if I can get in touch with him and bought the game.
24 hours is probably too tight a timeline for me, hard to get on my own laptop consistently each day to take a turn. I enjoyed Advance Wars by Web as their default timer was 1 week for your turn in the ranked games with it adding a day or so to the timer after your turn (so iirc if you took 3 days to do your turn you would then add 1 day and have 5 days to take your next turn). Custom games you could set your timer up to 1 month.
Yes, it was released as an official game client You can still find TripleA but it's rather daunting for new players, the official game looks a lot more appealing. If 24 hours is make or break then TripleA might be the better option after all.
I researched this a few years ago, I was living on a bus and had spotty/slow internet, but still wanting to play an engaging game. Anything requiring synchronicity was out. Real time is out too obviously. But while any turn-based game can technically be played by mail, many have so many opportunities for decisions and responses that waiting for each would drag. As an example, a turn of Magic the Gathering has something like 24 priority passes that both players have to acknowledge. In person it's easy, as you usually just skip them or interrupt when you want to do something. But in PBEM, you have to check each time, which means there'd be a small part of doing things and a lot of emails just saying "pass priority" which is lame.
So the game has to 1) be turn based in some form, and 2) has to have enough interesting decisions or actions to take between needing to consult the other player to be worthwhile. Also wanted 3) two player, as I didn't want to organize a whole thing, I just wanted to play with a pal
The classic here is chess, since (rhetorical) you can get a lot of mileage analyzing the board and thinking about moves before you make yours. But I'm not much of a chess guy, I wanted something with a little more pizzazz.
The pickings were slim, but I did ultimately settle on Codex: the Card Game. It's a weird card-based game meant to emulate an RTS of all things, with champions and factions and such. But it has a good amount of depth, and the interplay was fun, and it is actually designed such that each player doesn't need any response from their opponent during their own turn (ideal PEMB!). It's out of print, but you can still buy a digital copy and print your own cards to play via sending pictures to one another. When my friend and I played we also put together a complicated Google sheet that served as our boards, to digitize it further. Sadly, we only got halfway through our first game (and I took a pretty large upper hand) before my friend lost interest, so I didn't end up getting to explore too much :(
I really wanted to figure out MtG by email a little while ago. I obviously ran into the same problem you mentioned, but I was wondering if maybe it could work like you submit your whole turn, and then your opponent can respond point by point and it would send it back. I think that still wouldn't be super fun, and almost require it's own client, but I just really want to play more magic with the little time I have available :(
I am going to check out Codex though that sounds cool
I didn't realise PBEM was still a thing, and I'm definitely going to discover some month-long hyperfixation because of this thread.
I've been playing hnefatafl (otherwise known as 'viking chess') through both an app of the same name and an unrelated website (https://aagenielsen.dk/). It's not a PBEM but it goes at the same pace as one; you make your moves and check the app a few hours later to see if there's been a response.
The game could equally be played on a physical board and the moves relayed via email. You can play on a standard chessboard if you place pieces on the line intersections instead of the squares, to get the required 7x7 layout.
This is one of the games I grew up with that no one else ever has heard of!
Thank you! Will check out both the app and the site :)
Keep an eye out for me! I use the same username as here
I played Gazillionaire with friends back in the day. Also a lot of Age of Wonders (the original), which was a lot of fun, although the game had some design flaws!
I had the demo of this decades ago. I didn't even realize that was an option.
Age of Wonders? Someone actually made a tool for it that streamlines pbem by fishing the game from your mailbox and alerting you when it's your turn. We haven't played in years but... he's still in our discord! I guess we used to be pretty into it.
My biggest issue with it (there are smaller issues) is that pbem doesn't support turn based combat - you play your movies on the world board during your turn as normal but if you enter combat, it must be resolved automatically. But auto-combat sucks! Since you can't use strategy, you lose more often if you are relying on units with stronger, less straightforward abilities.
No gazillionare. I think the version I had capped out after a certain number of turns and you could only use one set of planets.
Oh, the very old demo! (shareware?) I played that as a kid with my siblings! Pbem came after that with online friends, we selected from the complete pool of planets. We stopped (at the time) because the owners of the IP seemed content with repeatedly selling basically the same game for relatively hefty (for such an ancient game) prices without ever fixing any bugs. I always thought I'd make my own trading game one day that was more difficult to cheat on but I haven't really had the time so far...
Board game arena would be my first recommendation. A lot of really good games have been implemented on there and you can play entirely asynchronously with friends or strangers. There are rumors even twilight imperium will be there someday, and that is a beast of a game.
Civ 6 is also a good one for this. It has built-in “play by cloud” support. A couple years ago, I built roze.run, a discord bot for game notifications that still sees pretty regular traffic from people playing it.
I remember running into some issues with the play by cloud service for Civ 6 awhile ago, though I honestly can't remember what they were since it's been a long while since I played. I may need to come back to it, I know I didn't enjoy it as much as Civ 5, and wish they had included a PBEM/cloud option built into that game instead of needing to rely on a 3rd party client.
I haven't touched board game arena in years, thank you for reminding me that exists!
I have thought Dominion would be good to play by Zoom. All the draw stacks are common, so you can draw cards for the other players to keep the state consistent. The only random state is each player's deck, which they can shuffle themselves.
I think it should work by mail too, though maybe there is not enough strategy to warrant the long time between turns.
I have to say, I had never heard of this concept before and just went down a rabbit-hole on PBEM games... This sounds great. As a dad with less time for gaming as well, I'd love to dive into something like this. I see there are a lot of historical war games i'd love to try my hand at, but I don't think I know anyone atm who would jump into something like this with me. If anyone wants to get something started, I'd be more than willing.
Solium Infernum has been my group's game of choice for this format since the remake on Steam released. I think if you're intrigued by stuff like Shadow Empire you'll find a lot to love in it. Not quite a 4X but a strategic area control with a lot of diplomacy and dealmaking.
I played a ton of Frozen Synapse this way back in the day. It's a feature of the game. Worth checking out.
Adding that to my wishlist, thanks for bringing it up!
Great, hope you enjoy it if you ever check it out.
When I graduated University a bunch of us kept up a Risk Gane through a Facebook app.
Risk is definitely a game that lends itself to this sort of gameplay. But it wasn't that fun when a week or two might go by between turns, then a turn might be attacking one country.
Not exactly email, but Mafia and Werewolf are fun to play on forums. Phases typically last 24 hours, giving ample time to respond and argue and such during day phase for votes, and for the Mafia/Werewolves and other night roles to submit their moves.
Honestly really miss playing it. I played it on Comicfury for a few years, and analysis could get deep. I remember once I realized someone couldn't be Mafia since there was one left and they hadn't logged in for three days.