From mailbox to map table - the age of play by mail

Somewhere in 1970, a soldier in Hawaii opened letters every morning. Rick Loomis was stationed at Fort Shafter, and in his off hours he ran a game he had invented himself: Nuclear Destruction. Players mailed their moves to him, he worked out the results, and he wrote back to tell everyone what had happened to their empire. Before long he had more than two hundred players spread across several games. The mail had become his table.

That picture, a game living inside envelopes that travel back and forth, is almost forgotten now. Yet there is a straight line from those mornings in Hawaii to the solo and journaling games we talked about in the previous chapter. Play by mail was the first answer to a simple question: how do you play together when you cannot sit at the same table?

A game that writes letters

The idea was older than Loomis. Chess and go had been played by post for centuries, move by move, two players writing directly to each other. Correspondence chess had its own culture, its own patience. But those were games for two.

The leap came with Diplomacy. From 1963 onward people played it through the mail, and it brought something new: more than two players, and a game master in the middle who received every move, weighed them against one another, and published the outcome. Often this happened in a fanzine, a homemade little magazine passed around among enthusiasts. Diplomacy is a game of negotiation, of alliances made and betrayed, and that turned out to work surprisingly well on paper. Players wrote each other letters full of promises. Some forged the letters of others to make an ally stumble. The intrigue did not shrink across the distance. It grew.

The post as a machine

Loomis turned it into a business. He founded Flying Buffalo in 1970, and soon bought a computer with a single purpose: to process the moves of all those players. An advertisement from the time boasted that the games were adjudicated by a fair and impartial computer. For an ordinary player in the early 1970s, that was about as close to digital play as you could get.

What made play by mail special was not the technology but the rhythm. A turn took days, sometimes weeks. You sent your move off, and then the waiting began. That waiting was not a flaw. It was the form itself. You did not play despite the distance, you played with it. Someone living in a remote corner, far from any gaming club, could suddenly join dozens of others. The mailbox connected people who would never meet.

Where the post touched roleplaying

Here the line comes together. That same Rick Loomis published Tunnels & Trolls in 1975, the second roleplaying game ever released, meant as a more approachable alternative to Dungeons & Dragons. And a year later he wrote Buffalo Castle, as far as we know the first solo adventure ever made for a roleplaying game, arriving before the well-known pick-your-path books.

This was no accident. Someone who spent years designing games for people sitting alone at home, far from a group, naturally thought about how you could play by yourself. Tunnels & Trolls gained more than thirty of those solo adventures, and the game could also be played by post. The three modes, together at a table, alone at home, and at a distance through the mail, were for Flying Buffalo three sides of a single idea: a game does not have to wait for everyone to be in the same place.

The messy ending, and what remained

In the 1980s the hobby exploded. Hundreds of small play by mail companies sprang up, most of them tiny, most of them short-lived. Well over ninety percent eventually went under. The games grew more complex, leaned ever harder on computers, and when the internet arrived the reason to wait for the mail carrier disappeared. Email took over, and after that the direct online play in which everyone is present at once.

Still, something stayed behind. The patient rhythm of play by mail, a move, then waiting, then the world writing back, you recognize it today in every journaling game where you keep a diary and let time do its work. You recognize it in solo games you play at your own pace, with no group waiting on you.

With Analogue we are trying to bring that way of playing back on purpose. Real time and the time inside the fiction line up: the waiting is not a break from the game, it is the game. And precisely because you play from your own home, at your own pace, the hardest hurdle of any roleplaying game falls away, namely finding a moment when everyone can sit at the table at once. That is also what lets several players be linked together without a single calendar ever having to match. It is still a matter of waiting, and then we will see whether Analogue makes good on that promise.

The soldier in Hawaii did not know it, but when he opened his envelopes on those mornings, he was also opening a way of playing that never quite went away. The post has grown quieter. The waiting has stayed.