play-by-mail
play-by-mail adjective: describing a game that can be played in a turn-based fashion through postal mail or email.
Adjective
play-by-mail (not comparable)
- Describing a game that can be played in a turn-based fashion through postal mail or email.
- Heimito Gerhardt, a fan of gaming by mail, presented Conrad and me with our own play-by-mail kits as he accompanied us to the bus station. It so happened that Heimito corresponded with Rex Douglas (one of Conrad's idols), the great American gamer and star writer for one of the most prestigious of...2011, Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, The Third Reich, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 25
- Synonyms:
- PBM
Noun
play-by-mail (plural play-by-mails)
- A play-by-mail game.
- THE COST is $25 per month or $60 for 3 months. Each month includes one grand strategy turn and 4 or 5 weekly situation turns. This is an average of less than $4 per turn, just a little more expensive than other play-by-mails, and you get detailed descriptions and color maps with each turn.1997 December 9, Christopher A. McNair, “Re: world war: smart gamers needed”, in alt.games.wargames (Usenet)
Synonyms of play-by-mail
Forms of play-by-mail
| plural | play-by-mails |
|---|
Questions about play-by-mail
- What does play-by-mail mean?
- Play-by-mail means describing a game that can be played in a turn-based fashion through postal mail or email.
- What part of speech is play-by-mail?
- Play-by-mail can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near play-by-mail in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: play-by-mail (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “play-by-mail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/play-by-mail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.