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frompdx

I love the play by email concept.

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My cousin and I were both Civ fanatics in our younger days.

We started playing a game via email and it's been fantastic. It hits all of the sweet spots:

- Playing a favorite game

- Playing with a relative/friend who also loves the game

- The async nature of email means we can play when we have time since we both have jobs and families

- The slow playing forces you to really stop and think about each turn

Highly recommend it.

Play by email is also great for enjoying games with people who suffer from serious analysis paralysis. These people are unbearable to game with at the tabletop but really take advantage of the extra time afforded by async gaming to make for some deep games.

It seems like some games (Diplomacy in particular) should almost explicitly encourage the medium of mail rather than table top play.

Std feature for civ games. Other older games had it too. Works well with round based games, especially chess.

People used to play chess via snail mail.

I think of this every time someone mentions "man, the lag here is terrible"

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