The earliest play-by-mail games developed as a way for geographically separated gamers to compete with each other using postal mail. Chess and Go are among the oldest examples of this. In these two-player games, players sent

Jim Townsend identifies the two key figures in PBM games as the players and the moderators, the latter of which are companies that charge "turn fees" to players—the cost for each game turn. In 1993, Paper Mayhem—a magazine for play-by-mail

Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo Games stated in 1985 that the Nuts & Bolts of PBM (first called Nuts & Bolts of Starweb) was the first PBM magazine not published by a PBM company. The name changed to Nuts & Bolts of Gaming and it eventually went out of print.

• List of play-by-mail games
• Play-by-post role-playing game
• Turn-based game

Judith Proctor noted that play-by-mail games have a number of advantages. These include (1) plenty of time—potentially days—to plan a move, (2) never lacking players to face who have "new tactics and ideas", (3) the ability to play an "incredibly

Loth noted that, in 1986, $3–5 per turn was the most prevalent cost. At the time, some games were free, while others cost as much as $100 per turn.
Play-by-mail magazine Paper Mayhem stated that the average turn processing time in 1987 was two

Besides articles and reviews on PBM games, authors have also published PBM fiction articles according to Shannon Muir. An early example called