Hello! Do you have any recommendations for two or more player games to be played as play-by-post/ suitable for long-distance play?
Hello there friend! I sure do! I also have some extra recommendations at the bottom, in case your fiending for choice.
Strange Days My Love, by Honest Charlie Harris.
This world is our world. A world where your dreams come out of your head and join you in walking on the ground for a time. A world where the non-sense and fantastical abound in every corner of the planet including, but most definitely not limited to, the strange land one of you will be traveling to. You’ll define home for yourselves but you will find your home just as weird and wonderful as the distant land.
Strange Days, My Love is an epistolary role-playing game for two players who are madly in love with one another. You’ll first work together to create yourselves and define your relationship before one of your characters leaves on a trip to a mysterious land. You’ll be writing letters and back and forth, inspired by tables of strange occurrences, until you feel the game has run its course. Then you’ll end the game, just like you started it, together.
This game has you play two characters in a long distance relationship. The game is made fantastical by giving the departing partner a mysterious land to travel to, making the events that affect them there a little bit separated from real life. You'll need a set of polyhedral dice to play, to generate everything from your pet names, relationship dynamics, and events that will show up as time passes.
I like that this game provides you with really strong questions that make very bold statements about your relationship from the start. It's a great way to inspire creativity, and the fact that the ending is potentially positive, negative or ambitious; leaves you playing the game with a continual sense of anticipation. You decide to stop writing when one character has decided to stop. This might be because they are coming home, or because they've decided that this relationship is no longer working. How exactly everything ends can be left up to chance, or it can be a decision the two of you make.
Big Bad Evil Rant, by Studio Trinket Mx.
Be a Villain. Fail. Rant about it.
Being evil is not easy. Between incompetent minions, annoying superheroes, and the randomness of destiny, the work of a supervillain is hard and underappreciated. But nothing like ranting about your problems to someone who understands your struggles. Someone evil, just like you. And who knows? Maybe they can help you achieve your evil schemes. Or at least try.
Big Bad Evil Rant is an epistolary role-playing game for two players where you’ll play villains and rant about your failed plans.
In this game, you and your friend are villains whose plans are constantly foiled by a group of heroes, incompetent minions or fate. You will write each other letters where you’ll rant about the misfortunes of your lives, as you look for ways to make your evil plans succeed.
For folks who want a light-hearted game, this is the game for you. You create a villain, and simply write to each-other complaining about how your most recent plans have been ruined. I think there's a lot of potential if you want to be silly! This is also a great example of a world-building game that you slowly fill in as you play, which is great for folks who love mutually creating their own lore.
The Other Side, by Chloe Shepherd.
You are an animal. Most things are beyond your comprehension. Chief among them, though, is that big fence. Why is it there? What’s on the other side? And why does it smell so different over there?
The Other Side is an epistolary (letter writing) game for two players. You are animals from different worlds who are separated by a big fence, writing each other letters to find out what things are like on the other side. Roll to find out what your day was like, or invent your own details! This is your story.
In this game, you play as a farm animal and a forest animal, communicating from two different sides of a fence, and learning about each-other's lives. You use roll-tables to determine the weather, special events, and items your animal may have found, and use this to inform the questions your characters ask each-other. At some point, one animal will have to decide whether or not they cross the fence. If you leave your starting habitat, this is likely the end of the game - although, if there's story that you feel has yet to be resolved, you can certainly keep going!
[REDACTED], by corv leary.
Your mail arrives already opened. You knew it would; your letters have been screened for months. You're used to it at this point, the outrage having faded, and it's just another mild inconvenience that you work around. And work you will, because you'd do anything for that shred of contact with the one you love, so far away.
[REDACTED] is a game about writing letters and attempting to communicate. You play as a soldier and their beloved, separated by war, who try to stay in contact despite the constant censoring of their letters by an unknowable system of rules. It requires three players to play.
This game is the one game on this list that requires three players. You have a soldier, the soldiers' beloved, and a government agent, situated between the lovers. The Soldier & Beloved use prompts provided to determine what they are going to write about to each-other. The Agent intercepts their mail and reads it, redacting pieces until the letter is basically unreadable. The reasons why the Agent redacts certain parts are invented by the Agent player, but the author of the game makes it clear that whatever rubric you use, it should be consistent.
I think this is a great game to talk about government surveillance & war. I think it might also be interesting to see whether the Soldier & Beloved find ways to communicate outside the surveillance & redaction the Agent imposes on their attempts to keep in touch.
Together We Write Private Cathedrals, by Weaver Walker.
Together We Write Private Cathedrals is a letter (and other things) writing game for two players. In it you take on the roles of two lovers at some point in history. You are asked to tell the story of your love through bits of writing and despite the fact that you cannot be always be open or explicit.
This is a game that involves creating and unraveling a piece of queer history, inspired by real or invented queer couples. Your characters can't always be honest about their feelings with each-other: they might have to write in metaphor, or dilute how they feel. You also aren't guaranteed that your work will survive history. A bad roll may ensure that the record of your love never survives. This is great place to explore the way queer history may or may not have affected your own knowledge and experience!
Strange Places, by AdventureByMail.
AS A REPORTER for the independent magazine Strange Places, you've covered paranormal events and mysterious figures from small towns across the country. Few things surprise you anymore. But as the end of November draws near, you feel the deadline for your next article closing in.
Desperate for leads, you and your colleague decide to split up and look for stories in different regions of the country. You agree to stay in contact through letters, keeping each other updated on your respective progress as you travel, explore, and investigate the unknown.
Designed specifically to be played through the mail, Strange Places has two players using regular playing cards as prompts as they write and send correspondences as journalists for a paranormal investigative magazine.
This is a great game for folks who like the strange and slightly off-kilter. Use a deck of cards and some dice to create prompts that include plenty of details, that you'll incorporate in the letters you send each-other.
In theory, I think it might be possible to also play this game with three players, if you create a role of an editor, someone who two journalists are both writing two! You'd have to decide what that editor's role is: are they sending tips to each of their journalists? Are they investigating something at home? Do they have the ability to open doors or get clearance for things their agents normally wouldn't have?
You can also check out my Epistolary game tag, with a number of other letter-writing games, some of which can expand to fit more than just two players!
I also have a Duet Games tag, for two-player specific games. I'm not sure how many would translate to epistolary or play-by-post games, but some of them might work!
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