Editing Play-by-mail game (section)

===Complexity===
Jim Townsend stated in a 1990 issue of ''White Wolf Magazine'' that the complexity of PBM games is much higher than other types on the average.<ref>[[#Tow90|Townsend 1990]]. p. 18.</ref> He noted that PBM games at the extreme high end can have a thousand or more players as well as thousands of units to manage, while turn printouts can range from a simple one-page result to hundreds of pages (with three to seven as the average).<ref name=Tow1990y>[[#Tow90|Townsend 1990]] pp. 18–19.</ref>{{efn|The PBM game ''Eressea'' had over 1,800 players in 2001.<ref>[[#Lin22|Lindahl 2022]].</ref>}} According to John Kevin Loth, "Novices should appreciate that some games are best played by veterans."<ref name=Loth42/> In 1986, he highlighted the complexity of ''Midgard'' with its 100-page instruction manual and 255 possible orders.<ref name=Loth42/><ref name="Townsend1988a"/> A.D. Young stated in 1982 that computers could assist PBM gamers in various ways including accounting for records, player interactions, and movements, as well as computation or analysis specific to individual games.<ref>[[#You82|Young 1982]]. p. 36.</ref>

Reviewer Jim Townsend asserted that ''[[Empyrean Challenge]]'' was "the most complex game system on Earth".<ref name="Townsend1988a"/>{{efn|Vern Holford, owner of Superior Simulations, developed ''[[Empyrean Challenge]]'', a PBM game that reviewer Jim Townsend described in 1988 as "the most complex game system on Earth" with some turn results for large positions at 1,000 pages in length.<ref name=Townsend1988a>[[#Tow88|Townsend 1988]]. p. 20.</ref> According to Townsend, in those cases there was a significant investment in time to understand what happened on a turn as well as to fill out future turn orders.<ref name="Townsend1988a"/> He said a player without a spreadsheet was "nearly doomed from the outset".<ref name=Townsend1988a/>}} Other games, like ''[[Galactic Prisoners]]'' began simply and gradually increased in complexity.<ref name=Loth42/> As of August 2021, [[Rick Loomis PBM Games]]' had four difficulty levels: easy, moderate, hard, and difficult, with games such as ''Nuclear Destruction'' and ''[[Heroic Fantasy]]'' on the easy end and ''Battleplan''—a military strategy game—rated as difficult.<ref>[[#Ric21|Rick Loomis PBM Games 2021]].</ref>