ILLUMINATI Play-By-Mail game, 1984

DO UNTO OTHERS
before they do unto you!

Congress is controlled by the Mafia...
South American Nazis are plotting the Final Reich...
the Cattle Mutilators are trying to take over Hollywood!

MORE SECRECY THAN EVER BEFORE!

1. Complete anonymity for back-stabbing, probing, infiltrating, and take-overs is now available because you can now play ILLUMINATI by mail!
2. Featuring new ILLUMINATI groups, new control groups, and an expanded method of controlling, neutralizing, or destroying other groups!
3. Probe groups you want to control, infiltrate them with your agents; then take control of their leaders - but beware, some of your trusted recruits may be infiltrators planted by other Illuminati!
4. Up to 32 actions per turn!
5. Operate in total secrecy or ... make (and break) alliances.

NO EXTRA $$ — No Beacon Fees — No Colonies — No Special Charges
NOTHING EXTRA EVER!

PLUS: No turn deadlines! 24-hour turn-around! Professional management! Extensive playtesting (over 1,000 playtest turns already processed)!

ILLUMINATI PLAY BY MAIL

Set-Up Fee: $15.00 (Covers set-up, rulebook, and first 3 turns)
Turn Fee: $4.00/turn after third turn

BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO RULE THE WORLD!
[A]dventure Systems, Dept. of Mayhem and Disorder
1669-D South Voss, Suite FF, Houston, TX 77057

ILLUMINATI and the all-seeing pyramid are trademarks of Steve Jackson Games. ILLUMINATI Play-By-Mail is a licensed version of SJ Games' ILLUMINATI boardgame. All rights reserved. Fnord.

The illustration is straightforward: the all-seeing eye-in-the-pyramid of the Illuminati, the ultimate secret society, has arrived in a simple country mailbox. Steve Jackson Games' ILLUMINATI game has literally hit the scene in a play-by-mail edition. I expect that this ad ran somewhere in the vicinity of Dragon Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 3, August 1984. (I didn't log it at the time, but I found raw text matches for that issue in the Internet Archive's collection.)

(Not that this ever stops me, but) I can't speak too much to the subject, never having played the game in question or read Robert Anton Wilson's books that inspired it, but always being acutely aware of their existence. The book figured large among the Beat volumes on the shelves of the Granville Book Company during my adolescence (well, many of its fellow traveller books were locked in the front display cabinet -- traditionally some of the most-shoplifted items... looks like this book wants to go On The Road also!) and SJG products always jumped out in the comic store basements where pen and paper tabletop gaming commerce was conducted (too many good ideas and, I gather, inadequate company support: the Steve Jackson Games story. GURPS probably took the air away from Car Wars, then INWO (the CCG version of ILLUMINATI) took the air away from GURPS, then Munchkin basically starved out the rest of the company. That's my understaning. But I seriously digress!) The shared "meta-conspiracy" premise of the book and the game, tying in all of the wingnut groups on the periphery of society, was a fun idea.

Wikipedia describes how the PBM version arose after the designer of an unrelated game, Draper Kauffman, noticed that he kept running up against problems in his own game design which he observed could be fixed by doing what the designers of the regular, not-by-mail version of ILLUMINATI had done, ultimately doing what inertia so demonstrably wanted him to do and simply adapting that game for PBM play instead. Eventually administration of the PBM version of this game was taken over by the venerable great-granddaddy of North American PBM, Flying Buffalo. Yikes, they have a new website that represents a tiny step forward and a big step back, as it seems to have thrown out all of the information about all of their products... but may, eventually, offer a streamlined modern e-storefront. Here, their old website talked about running PBM ILLUMINATI there as recently as May of last year, I have pulled it up via the Wayback Machine. Maybe Rick Loomis's force of will was the only thing keeping the company in business (I guess that's more of an "almost certainly" than a "maybe"), it's just hard to see how a business can stay in operation when you replace everything on the shelves with "under construction" signs. I hope that this new website returns to form -- it can't be more than a day's worth of cutting and pasting -- but I have my reservations that my hope is misplaced. But look, I continue to digress and digress further! In conclusion, I really appreciate the way this ad casually wraps. Fnord.