The Very Slow Game Jam

2025-06-12 (Mod: 2025-09-29)  |   5 minutes

When I was a teenager, my dad and I would play slow chess. His job involved regularly rotating shift work, which meant that we often went weeks at a time where our days didn’t really overlap. So, to stay connected, we kept a chess board in the kitchen. Every day, Dad would make a move on the board while eating after he got home, and I would make mine after school. It was a fun way to stay connected when our lives were otherwise out of sync.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were also inventing what would become an important ritual between us.

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Years later, when my wife and I moved across the country, Dad and I revived the practice with email chess. Computers were terrifying new territory for him, but he overcame that initial intimidation and we forged ahead with our slow games, exchanging moves and conversations every few days for several years. There were still visits, of course, and phone calls, and texts, but behind it all, there was also the game.

Eventually though, life with the kids got hectic for me, and he got involved in a rock band, and that email thread petered out.

Our third incarnation started just a few years ago, shortly after Dad got sick. This time it was in the form of Social Chess. He didn’t have a lot of energy for it though, so the turns passed even more slowly. It was always a good day when I got that little notification telling me that there was a new move waiting. It meant that Dad was having a good day. Maybe only once a month, but it was enough to keep the game going.

Unfortunately, he died before we finished our first game, but Games Completed was never an important stat for us. What mattered was that we had revived our way of connecting - a way that stretched back 40 years - and we maintained it right up until the day he died. Literally.

I still have the last move he sent me, blinking there on the notification bar. I didn’t notice it until a few days after the funeral, but it’s dated just six hours before he died. I haven’t opened it yet, and I don’t think I ever will, because as long as it stays there, with his last move still pending, I’m still playing chess with my dad.

So Now What?

I didn’t write that to bring a dish of maudlin to the picnic. I wanted to paint a picture of what I mean when I talk about “slow games” and the kind of social landscape they can create. The kind of resonance they can have in our lives.

Slow games are not necessarily about chess, nor are they limited to fathers and sons. They’re about providing a shared experience over an extended period of time. One that, on the surface is entertaining, but that also creates space, time, and a substrate for other, more meaningful interactions.

Slow games are not high-stress. They’re not high-intensity, the way most video games are. They shouldn’t require major investments of time or resources. But they should reward thoughtfulness and patience, and encourage everyone to slow down a little and be deliberate about their involvement.

As I sit here, looking at that blinking notification, I wonder: Can I come up with a game concept that does something similar for others? Maybe something less nerd-coded than chess?

Not So Fast

Now, before everyone starts spamming me with replies about Words With Friends and its brethren, let me explain why they don’t quite meet the bar for what I’m talking about.

If you’ve ever played WwF, you’ll know that playing with actual friends, at a leisurely pace, and having a conversation while doing so is indeed possible, but it certainly isn’t the design focus of the app.

Instead, players are enticed to play against strangers, to play quickly, to play against as many people as possible, and to limit the conversation to a quick “GG” at the end.

The only times I ever had what might be classed as a conversation there were the tedious exchanges that inevitably took place when I was accused of cheating. (People never want to believe me when I tell them that I used to be a nationally ranked competitive Scrabble player.)

Furthermore, the conversations there are subordinate to the gameplay - a single conversation lives entirely in the comment thread attached to a specific game. You can’t go back to review the history of an extended conversation without having to leapfrog back through all the different games you’ve played together. This makes the social experience fragmented and chaotic - pretty much the antithesis of what I’m talking about.

So, due to simple psychology and economics, I don’t think a slow game of the kind I envision can be successful if it’s built as a cloud service, because the money pressures will always favor the number of games played over the quality of the interactions.

If Not That, Then What?

I don’t yet know what kinds of actual games I’m talking about, but I see them as being secondary to the conversation, with “moves” being embedded into the conversation, rather than the other way around.

What do you guys think? Would you enjoy a slow game experience? And what would that even look like? Let’s chat about it below. I’ll start with a simple question: What games can you think of that would work as inserts into the flow of a text conversation, such as email, SMS, or Signal conversations?