Skip to main content

The Fiendishly Complicated Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Discover The Campaign for North Africa

Monopoly is notoriously time-consuming. On the childhood Christmas I received my first copy of that Parker Brothers classic, my dad and I started a game that ended up spreading over two or three days. That may have had to do with my appreciation for Monopoly’s aesthetic far exceeding my grasp of its aim, and I’ve since realized that it can be played in about an hour. That’s still a good deal longer than, say, a game of checkers, but it falls somewhat short of the league occupied by The Campaign for North Africa — which is, in fact, a league of its own. Since its publication in 1979, it’s been known as the longest board game in existence, requiring 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to complete.

We are, of course, talking about a war game, and that genre has its own standards of complexity — standards The Campaign for North Africa leaves in the dust. “The game itself covers the famous WWII operations in Libya and Egypt between 1940 and 1943,” writes Kotaku’s Luke Winkle. “You’ll need to recruit 10 total players, (five Allied, five Axis,) who will each lord over a specialized division. The Front-line and Air Commanders will issue orders to the troops in battle, the Rear and Logistics Commanders will ferry supplies to the combat areas, and lastly, a Commander-in-Chief will be responsible for all macro strategic decisions over the course of the conflict. If you and your group meets for three hours at a time, twice a month, you’d wrap up the campaign in about 20 years.”

You can get an idea of what you’d be dealing with over those two decades in the video below from Youtuber Phasing Player, an overview that itself takes about an hour and a half. “Honestly, if I’m being straight-up here, this game does sound, broadly speaking, like a fun time,” he says, half an hour deep into the explanation. “Imagine setting up a giant map of Africa,” getting your friends together, “Sarah’s in charge of the air force and Jim is in charge of logistics. You have all these people in charge of different things, and you’re communicating strategies, and the commander-in-chief is formulating plans and doing all this stuff. That sounds like a real hoot, right?” Alas, “the big asterisk comes in when that good time has to last literally a thousand hours,” involving what another player quoted by Winkle calls “doing tedious calculations all the time.”

Those calculations necessitate paying close attention, on every single turn, to not just quantities like fuel reserves but the historically accurate size of the barrels containing those reserves. Note also that, as Winkle adds, “the Italian troops in World War II were outfitted with noodle rations, and in the name of historical dogma, the player responsible for the Italians is required to distribute an extra water ration to their forces, so that their pasta may be boiled.” The Campaign for North Africa‘s designer, the late Richard Berg, claimed that the so-called “pasta rule” was a joke, and that the game’s fiendish overall complexity was in keeping with the style of the times, a “golden age” of war gaming with high sales and ever-escalating ambitions. As with so many other seemingly inexplicable artifacts of cultural history, one falls back on a familiar explanation: hey, it was the 70s.

via Kotaku

Related content:

Watch a Playthrough of the Oldest Board Game in the World, the Sumerian Royal Game of Ur, Circa 2500 BC

Learn to Play Senet, the 5,000-Year Old Ancient Egyptian Game Beloved by Queens & Pharaohs

The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rollicking Novel

Monopoly: How the Original Game Was Made to Condemn Monopolies & the Abuses of Capitalism

Download & Play the Shining Board Game

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/jpXnkcJ
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...