Imagine signing up, along with 9 friends, to play a game which will could take 10 years to complete — and those years dealing with quirky, complex rules and finicky calculations. That is what Richard Berg’s 1979 WWII board wargame published by SPI, “The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940–43”, demands — as I learned from Luke Winkie’s article The Notorious Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours To Complete.
(That article was published on 5 Feb 2018 - and the game guest starred in The Big Bang Theory (S11 E16 - The Neonatal Nomenclature) a few weeks later on 1 March 2018, so I did wonder if the writers learned of it there or if it was a serendipitous case of “multiple discovery”.)
The box declares it “A super-detailed, intensive simulation specially designed for maximum realism”. I can’t judge the “realism”, but “super-detailed” is undeniable. Notable rules include the pasta point (the Italians apparently need extra water rations to cook their macaroni) and fuel evaporation (everyone loses 3% of their fuel each turn, except for the British early in the game while they still use 50-gallon drums instead of jerry cans and lose 7%).
While playing a historical game, I do find myself wondering to what extent rules idiosyncrasies reflect reality, and how much they are simply game design features. I remember playing, perhaps around 1991, a simulation of 14th century village life, Stephen Baines’s “The Manor of Wodensfeld”, where sheep seemed to be effective game-winners — and the supplementary material did indeed comment “Sheep make a good profit and are not labour intensive. Already by 1310 England was exporting about 13 million pounds of wool, an increase of about 37% over the 1280 figure. This, of course [of course], is where the great growth in mediaeval farming was to be.” (This is a situation rather different from the typical game of Settlers of Catan, where sheep farmers often seem to have an excess of them, and find themselves hopefully offering them in return for wood or other more useful resources.)
Whether the choice of fuel containers was similarly fundamental in WWII, I don’t know — but Berg himself commented “The reality is that the Italians cooked their pasta with the tomato sauce that came with the cans. But I didn’t want to do a rule on that.”
In other games, if it becomes clear you are heading for a near-inevitable defeat, you might be glad to just get it over with quickly. Not an option here! In Erick Wujcik’s Amber Diceless Role-Playing, he writes “Corwin, the main character The Chronicles of Amber, goes through a lot of pain. Imagine you were the player, and Corwin was your character. How would you feel about being a helpless captive of your worst enemies? Would you still keep playing after Corwin’s eyes (your eyes!) were burned out of his head. Would you come back, session after session, to endure Corwin’s stay of years in a cramped dungeon cell, blind and with no hope? You might. If you loved your character.” Rulebook Heavily’s review of the Amber RPG, which critiques its adversarial gamesmastering advice, rightly points out “Of course, story-wise, Corwin’s four years in the cell take a couple of [short] chapters at most to resolve in the story, so returning ‘session after session’ itself misses the point (as all GMs who do this do).”
As someone whose gaming sessions are now occasional treats, I find long and complicated is a long way from my sweet spot (especially if playing the game of “helpless prisoner”!). But Winkie writes, of fans of “Campaign” “They’re drawn to the game not for its cleverness or flair, but for its absurd, maximalist nature” — and on those terms, “The Campaign for North Africa” does indeed sound like a great achievement.
_An earlier version of this article was published on Medium at https://medium.com/@terryboon/playing-the-very-long-game-thoughts-on-the-campaign-for-north-africa-f51a8669b3b4._