I spent a good chunk of my morning thinking about how some people play chess by mail, sending their moves back and forth in letters over weeks and months, and it got me wondering what would be the most difficult game to play by mail?
I'm thinking Monopoly. How would you even do that? How would you keep track of all the information and dice rolls while preventing players from cheating or moving out of turn? You would need to create what is essentially a physical blockchain, a ledger of every move which would need to be updated and copied and sent out to every player after every decision.
You would also need a way to determine dice rolls so no player could lie and say they rolled exactly what they needed, so I was thinking of creating a list of random rolls at the beginning which the players would move through one at a time, but that would risk making the game deterministic; if everything is predestined from the start, set in stone like prophecy, the you could look forward on the list and figure out exactly who would win. If someone landed in jail and saw that their next roll on the list was doubles, they would definitely roll to get out for free instead of paying. Their strategy would change if they knew all the rolls ahead of time, so maybe there could be an element of randomness, like a table of rolls the players could randomly choose from based on the date given in the postmark of the previous letter in the chain. "The Post Office processed this on November 13th, which means I rolled a five and a one, so that's six."
And then we have the same problem with the Chance and Community Chest cards. If you shuffled the decks and listed them all off in order at the start, then all the players would know whether they're in for a good or bad draw; "I just got out of jail, and there's a ⅙ chance I'm gonna roll a 7 and land on Community Chest which will take me to Boardwalk, but I can't afford to buy it yet, but but I also have Ventnor Avenue, so I could sell it to the guy who has the other two yellows and then Boardwalk is mine!" There would need to be an independent referee who would select cards for the players, or else another pseudo-random table for all 16 Chance and 16 Community Chest cards, "let's see, I landed on Chance with double fives, and on today's date in 1955 it was a waxing gibbous, which means I pick the fourth or eighth card on the list; today's date is odd, which means I pick the fourth, 'go directly to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.' Damn."
And auctions! How would you handle auctions? If a player wanted to auction a property, they would need to alert everyone else and then they'd all have to send their bids to the banker who would then tell them all where the auction stood, and then people could send in new bids, and it would take weeks for all the letters to reach everyone and if any of them got lost in the mail it would delay things even longer; it would be a total logistical nightmare!
I think it could be done.
I'd have to spend a lot of time ironing out the specifics so everything would work smoothly and be as balanced as possible, but it could definitely be done. It would be a test of endurance, and the players would probably lose patience and give up after a few weeks, but I think it would be worth a try.
If not Monopoly, then maybe Risk.
What do you guys think? Thoughts? Suggestions?
