Wired has published an article on play-by-mail gaming, which includes interviews with myself, Charles Mosteller from PlayByMail.net, and others. Take a look.. https://www.wired.com/story/multiplayer-gaming-envelopes-stamps-play-by-mail-history/ PS: If you’re arriving at the Suspense & Decision blog after reading the article on Wired, welcome! The play-by-mail hobby has many great games for you to choose from. See the right-hand […]
Back in the early 1990s, I was an active user of Usenet Newsgroups. If you don’t know what this is…before the Internet was dominated by web browsers, most of the Internet services were text-based, accessed using a command line terminal logged into a UNIX system. Usenet Newsgroups are forums organized by topic and the Usenet […]
by David Spencer and Shannon Muir Broden Although play-by-mail (PBM) gaming started in the United States in the 1970s, the industry grew rapidly and experienced its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. But communication in this period was not as free and easy as it is today, and the PBM community needed publications to help […]
NOTE: This is a re-post of my review that was originally on the PlayByMail.net Forums back in August 2020. Atlantis: New Originshttp://atlantis-pbem.com A free, fantasy-based 4x game This is not going to be a full-length game review, but I wanted to post this as I just stopped playing this game today. My first position in this game […]
Since returning to the hobby in 2018, I’ve attended two funerals for play-by-mail games. The first funeral was for Fantasy Tribe by Jeff Perkins, in the summer of 2018. This was a difficult funeral to attend, as I traveled on a long flight to Australia, only to learn upon my arrival that the funeral was […]
This is the first in a series of posts to the Suspense & Decision blog where I present an overview of some of the amazing publications from PBM history, sent to me by Edmund Hack. For a summary of this collection, please read my prior blog post, “A Collection of PBM History“. One of the […]
Ok…this is not a particularly impressive photo by any standards. I know that. I was too excited and impatient to stage this in such a way that I would given accolades for my skills as a photographer. What you are looking at is the contents of two boxes I received from Edmund Hack today. The […]
The stark reality is that more of the PBM hobby is behind us than in front us. Most of the articles in Suspense & Decision relate to the few PBM topics that are relevant today. It only makes sense that someone covers the irrelevant…err…nostalgic aspects of the hobby, as well, right? One of the things […]
As of this writing, I am playing in a Galac-Tac PBM game using the name/email account of “Neil York”. In the recent past, I briefly played in Phoenix: Beyond the Stellar Empire as “Kevin Neal”. My real name is neither “Neil York” or “Kevin Neal”. If you have read this far, you are probably wondering, […]
PBM gaming continues to suffer from under-exposure. This is true both outside PBM circles, as well as within and across the current PBM player base. There are various causes for this, of course, and there is no magical cure all for what ails the play by mail gaming industry and hobby. On the media front, […]
