I grew up in a board-game family. My brothers and I spent a great deal of time playing Risk and many other variants of the “Conquer the World” theme.
Now that we have grown, we literally live on 3 different continents (maybe we have finally conquered it after all).
That means these days we are rarely able to spend time sitting around the same table moving our pieces and rolling our dice.
Of course, we always have the option of playing correspondence games. In the old days, correspondence gaming required post-cards, identical boards and a lot of time. Chess was one of the most common games for correspondence play.
Email has made that significantly faster, but it can still be a pain to try and keep track of the moves.
An old high-school classmate of mine brought to my attention the website GamesByEmail.com
This site allows for turn-based play of games from Chess and Connect 4 (woohoo) to more complex games like Risk, Axis and Allies, and Diplomacy (actually, to protect the brands, the above games are “Gambit,” “WWII,” and “Politics,” respectively).
We are all able to take our turn in their JavaScript based interface, and get an email update when it is our turn again. Additionally, we are able to play some neat modifications that are unique to online play (including some “blind” options to Risk that mix it up in a fun way).
The user interface is not the finest in the world, but that is really not the point. The point, of course, is to take over the world!
