Is there a genre of online grand strategy games that are designed from the ground up to be played asynchronously?
One of my favourite things was playing scrabble online where I could just do a move and then move on with my day. It’d take a week to play a game but it was on our terms and that felt so good.
PBEM (Play By Email) was (and maybe still is) a big thing in the wargaming space. Long, long ago I was part of a group on USENET and later IRC that organised games of Stars! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!) with typically a cadence of a few turns per week, or sometimes "blitz" games played onn IRC with several turns per hour.
Quite fun, but needs a community interested in such, and very focused game design. (Specifically, need lots of meaningful decisions to be made each turn, but relatively few turns in a game.)
Stars! was one of many such games back in the day, but I'm pretty sure they're all dead now.
My google-fu is failing me. Is there some sort of community for play-by-email games that explicitly lists games that are still active? All the interesting games I came across look dead.
There were quite a few of those browser games around about 20 years ago.
If you really want to melt your brain, and have a lot of time to burn, you can play (the board game) Diplomacy by email. I used to do that a lot. But at our speeds, games took months or even years, not just a week. (We usually play with one turn every three days or even up to every two weeks.)
One of my favourite things was playing scrabble online where I could just do a move and then move on with my day. It’d take a week to play a game but it was on our terms and that felt so good.