To those of you who saw issue 19 or who are already familiar with the joys of playing games by post, most of the stuff in this section will be familiar to you, and I suggest you go straight to the ' Old Lags ' section. To those of you, however, who are wondering what postal gaming and this magazine are all about, read on. Classic games like chess and draughts have been played by post for many years but it is only since the 1960's, and the advent of a game called Diplomacy , that the idea of playing multi-player games by post caught on. Despite the rival attractions of these other means of playing games with people who live possibly thousands of miles away from you, the postal gaming hobby has survived as a cheap, leisurely and above all friendly arena in which to play games. A man or a woman decides to run some games by post and starts up a postal gaming magazine.
People subscribe to the magazine and sign up for one or more of the games on offer.
The GM processes the orders from all the players and adjudicates the games. A game report is then printed in the next issue of the magazine which is then posted to all the subscribers. A deadline is set so that players know when they have to send in their next set of orders. You may have spotted that games can take a long time to complete when played by post. It's not unheard of for games of Diplomacy to last two or three years.