Widely regarded as the most complicated board game ever made, The Campaign for North Africa tries to simulate WW2’s North African theater in as granular fashion as possible, with rules for everything from water spillage and evaporation to convoy truck breakdowns.
As a result, this 1978 title by Simulations Publications Inc is about as complicated to run as a real life war. Since the campaign it depicts took place between 1940 and 1943, it also takes at least as long to finish.
Infamous for its “pasta rule” which requires Italian troops to use more water supplies so they can cook spaghetti, The Campaign for North Africa is either a work of mad genius or a really unusual torture device. The game boasts a whopping 1,500 hours of play time (and you know designers always underestimate these things). The game’s rules recommend you play with ten people, five to a side, with each person taking control of just one facet of the conflict, so that their brains don’t explode. I’m paraphrasing slightly.
Like horror movie characters ignoring clear and obvious warnings, a pair of friends, Andy and James, have paid no heed to this suggestion. They are trying to complete The Campaign for North Africa all by themselves, documenting the process in podcast form. 20 months and 88 episodes after this folly began, they are finally done with the six-turn practice scenario, and are ready for the entire 111-turn war. Sharing their thoughts on the game via Reddit, they say “The work:fun ratio of The Campaign For North Africa is askew”.
Only getting together once a week for a few hours, the gamers were forced to come up with several nifty time-saving measures. These included magnetizing the maps and each game piece, to make setup the work of minutes rather than hours, and creating their own searchable PDF-version of the rules to speed up rule checking. They also used digital spreadsheets with automated calculations, to help with the immense amount of book-keeping The Campaign For North Africa demands from its victims. Ahem, I mean players.
Their recent longform Reddit post about the experience is a lot of fun to read. It’s full of gems like: “We still don’t understand what the camels do”. Sessions where all the two did was move trucks around in preparation for later fun, are described as low points of the gameplay, though they do say they enjoyed the dogfights during the air phase.
Going into more depth, the post describes The Campaign For North Africa as a “beautiful simulation of the uncaringly mundane slog of war command” but concludes that “unless you thoroughly enjoy the granular detail of breakdown of vehicles, consumption of fuel, updating of cohesion levels and CPA constantly, you’ll likely not enjoy playing this game for very long.”
And it seems no one has played it for very long, because although the game’s creators told Kotaku they expect someone has finished it, zero complete playthroughs have actually ever been recorded. Could this be the first?
The duo’s website ‘War With a Mate‘ gives little explanation for why Andy and James embarked on this adventure, besides running out of conversation topics after ten years of friendship. Apparently they aren’t experienced wargamers, citing Risk as the only game like this they’ve ever played. Their website says they’re going to continue out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness, though, even if it takes the rest of their mortal lives.
I don’t know whether I should salute, or slowly back away around a corner and run like hell.
Source: Wargamer
