PBEM Titan

Last updated on January 11, 2001.

For more information on Titan see my Titan Home Page.

There is now an improved Titan Dice Roller available for assisting in play by email games. You can contact it at dice@wolff.to.

For the last couple of years there has been organized PBEM Titan. This was due mainly to the efforts of Randy Pacetti. Randy has since been unable to continue coordinating things and I have taken over. You can contact me to get on the Titan game waiting list at titan-waitinglist@wolff.to. If you have trouble getting through, it may be because of my anti-spam blocks.

Because I haven't been able to do as good of a job as I would have liked getting new games organized and Don Wooods has graciously offered to help out, Don is now doing the actual work of putting new games together. At this point the situation is temporary and I will forward information about people being ready to play or ready to moderate on to him.

(There is a way to play unmoderated PBEM Titan using a system documented by Tero Mikko Laitinen.)

Lately I have been getting contacts from people who don't know how to play Titan. It would be a copyright violation to send people copies of the rules. If you don't know how to play, you should try to find a friend who has a copy of the game (Titan is a popular game amoung board/wargamers). Barring that you should be able to buy a copy of the game at a local game or hobby store. You can also order a copy direct from The Avalon Hill Game Company. Titan sells for $35. Note that you will be buying a boardgame, not a computer game.

We try to run games as close to FTF rules as possible. This makes the game run slower than if special rules were added, but we feel it is worth it to preserve the FTF rules. Typically games run for a number of months. Depending on what is happening, and the people involved in a particular game, a typical player may act from several times a day on weekdays, to once a week.

Generally you should either be able to check your email daily (during the week) or you should be willing to spend the extra time needed to send in conditional orders in advance.

Currently games are hand moderated. This has several effects. First is that we need people to moderate games. Second we play all six player games to keep the player to moderator ratio high. Third we generally limit players to one game at a time. Moderators are allowed to play in two games.

At this time there is a shortage of moderators (we have enough waiting players to start a game, but no moderator available) and there may be longer delays before getting into a game than normal.

Randy wrote up a handout that describes how the PBEM games are run. This may also shed some light on the game for people who have not played Titan previously.

Eventually we want to run Titan with automated moderators. However for now there is limited support for moderators. Currently I have a perl 5 script (which requires Net::SMTP) that handles generating master board reports. A sample initial board that goes with it is also available. Some other people have more extensive tools in development that are supposed to be close to being ready.

When we do have moderators there will be strict time limit rules. There will also be several categories of pace for games. Right now that isn't practical.

For PBEM games the following clarifications and errata are in effect.

For continuing players be sure to contact me (and Don) when you are eliminated from a game if you want to be placed back on the waiting list. I do hear from GMs about eliminations, but I don't know if the players want back on the waiting list right away.


This page is maintained by Bruno Wolff III on wolff.to.

A secure version of this page is located at: https://wolff.to/titan/pbem.html