There are board games that take twenty minutes. There are board games that take an evening. There are board games that require you to reserve a Saturday, warn your spouse, arrange childcare, purchase snacks in quantities normally associated with emergency preparedness, and begin explaining the rules sometime around breakfast. And then there is The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43.
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Photo courtesy of Michael Taylor and his daughter. Used with permission.[/caption]
James Purcell and Andy Taeger, two friends from Newcastle, are preparing to play the famously enormous World War II simulation from beginning to end. The game contains 111 turns, each of which represents roughly one week of the North African campaign. It was designed for as many as ten players, although James and Andy are attempting it with two. Estimates for completing the whole thing run to around 1,500 hours. They think it may take them twenty years. This is obviously ridiculous. I also think it might be one of the most beautiful things I have heard about gaming in a long time.
The BBC story about their project understandably focuses on the absurdity of the undertaking. The Campaign for North Africa has achieved near mythological status in tabletop gaming…
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There is a dangerous moment in every board gamer's life when a non-gaming friend says, “Sure, I'll try one.” Remain calm. Do not make any sudden movements. And, most importantly, do not immediately disappear into the basement and return carrying a box large enough to contain a microwave.
We have been waiting for this moment. That's the problem. When you love tabletop games, introducing someone to the hobby can feel like being handed five minutes to explain your favorite band, restaurant, television series, vacation destination, and minor religion simultaneously. You want them to understand why this thing matters. You want them to experience the clever mechanisms, impossible decisions, ridiculous betrayals, dramatic reversals, and that beautiful moment three hours into a game when everyone suddenly realizes Dave has been quietly collecting sheep for reasons nobody fully understands. So we get excited. And excitement makes us terrible ambassadors. Or, at least, obviously biased ambassadors to the point of destroying our credibility.
We start explaining. “This one's actually pretty simple.” This sentence is usually followed by eighteen minutes of rules. “You have workers, except they're technically druids, and you're placing them on action spaces to collect resources so you can fulfill contracts, although they're called prophecies, and the purple resource isn't actually a…
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