Game durations range from those which were only briefly available for play, such as Quest of Gorr, to those which have been played for decades or longer, such as Alamaze, Diplomacy, Hyborian War, and Chess. This list includes games which are no longer available for play as well as games that are still active. Only games which completed playtesting and were released for play are included here as a 'published' game. Many more play-by-mail games existed in nascent, playtest form than there are on this list. In other cases, a publishing company might license a game to another company-which could even translate and moderate the game in a different country. This is because the rights to play-by-mail games were occasionally sold among publishers. In some cases, more than one publisher can be found for the same game on the list. The sourcing of play-by-mail games in this list largely comes from these magazines, whether from reviews or advertisements, as well as additional magazines such as Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer, Dragon Magazine, and other publications that serviced the gaming community broadly, resuming with the contemporary online magazine Suspense and Decision, which supports the small but active play-by-mail gaming community today. This supported the publication of a number of newsletters from individual play-by-mail companies as well as independent publications such as Gaming Universal, Paper Mayhem, and Flagship which focused solely on the play-by-mail gaming industry. Other publishers followed suit, with significant expansion across the industry in the 1980s. This marked the beginning of the professional PBM industry.

In the early 1970s, in the United States, Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo Inc, began a number of play-by-mail games this included games such as Nuclear Destruction (1970). Diplomacy was first played by mail in 1963. It is unclear what the earliest play-by mail game is between chess and Go.

It includes games played only by postal mail, those played by mail with a play-by-email (PBEM) option, and games played in a turn-based format only by email or other digital format. This is a list of play-by-mail (PBM) games. Play-by-mail game The Land of Karrus, as portrayed in Paper Mayhem magazine.

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