Turn-based strategy games trace back to tabletop wargaming, where players alternated moves across a map or board, planning each step with care since there was no undo and no way to act out of turn.

As these games grew more ambitious — more players, bigger worlds, longer campaigns — a new format emerged in the 1970s and 80s to support that scale: play-by-mail. Instead of gathering around a table, players posted their orders to a central game master, often a company running dozens or hundreds of games at once, who processed everyone’s moves together and mailed back the results. This let games grow far beyond what a tabletop could hold, with players scattered across entire countries, each patiently plotting their next move while waiting for the next turnsheet to arrive.

At the heart of any turn-based game is a simple idea: rather than acting in real time, players make their decisions independently, and every turn resolves all at once. In StarwebTNG, this means each player submits their own orders — moving fleets, building industry, launching attacks — without knowing exactly what anyone else has planned. Once everyone’s submitted, or the turn’s deadline passes, all those orders are processed together, and the results are sent back to each player as their own personal turnsheet, showing exactly what happened to their empire and whatever else they can now see.

This simultaneous-resolution model is what gives turn-based strategy its distinctive character. Because you can’t react instantly to what your opponents are doing, every decision becomes a calculated gamble — you’re planning several moves ahead, weighing risk against opportunity, often without complete information about what’s unfolding elsewhere on the map. It also rewards a different kind of strategy than faster games: diplomacy, alliances, misdirection, and patient long-term planning all matter more when you can’t simply react on the fly.

Combined with the unhurried pace of each turn, it favours forethought over quick reflexes — a style of play that hasn’t gone out of fashion, even if the format it grew up in has changed.