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A 1970s boardgame takes about 1,500 hours to complete
- birdyrooster 5y agoGrowing up I had a mentor who started a game of this (or something very very similar) with his father in the early 80s that extended into the late 90s. The board was omnipresent in my memories of his house. They really loved war sims there. Anyways. Crazy game.
- jleyank 5y agoIt was actually a good game and could be done today with a little bit of laptop support. It was deliberately tedious but that’s not too bad. Doable with 2 and very good with 4. Played it a number of times. There are pc games that look to be more tedious so the genre still exists. It’s also far from the largest board war game by a little over half. Look for DAK for a less tedious same scale effort.
- exdsq 5y agoTried to convince my mate to have a room in his house dedicated to this game so we could have a play. Sadly life (and children) got in the way!
- boomboomsubban 5y agoImagine if you succeeded and 500 hours in the kids knocked over the table or whatever the equivalent is. You dodged a bullet there.
- ndonnellan 5y agoThis appears to be a repost/summary/blogspam of a 2017 kotaku piece: https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-hours-to-compl-1818510912 https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-...
- snarkerson 5y agoI was wondering why I was reading a vaguely paraphrased Kotaku article. Blogspam is a pernicious cancer.
- isoprophlex 5y agoThat's pretty hilarious considering this nagging popup i got > It looks like you’re using an ad blocker. With almost half of web users now running ad blockers, it’s now getting very hard to sustain an educational website and keep it free. I guess they had to resort to grabbing stuff off kotaku because those horrible adblockers killed their ad revenue... :^)
- boomboomsubban 5y agoNow I want to know if the high school kid finished the game. Mostly as I can't decide which answer I'm hoping for.
- morelisp 5y agoA recent (8 days ago) comment on the hexandcounter subreddit post announcing that game says they're still playing, though it's not confirmed by Jake himself. https://www.reddit.com/r/hexandcounter/comments/6r645b/my_friends_and_i_started_campaign_for_north_africa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hexandcounter/comments/6r645b/my_fr... The last official update was a year ago, they were just over 1/3 through the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cigarettes/comments/lez1wn/camel_crush_question/gnjw2eu/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Cigarettes/comments/lez1wn/camel_cr... (Personally, I don't find any of the - very few - claims to have played a full game solitaire to be plausible, and I'm not aware of anyone even claiming to have played a full multiplayer one.)
- boomboomsubban 5y ago"It's still potentially ongoing five years in" is the most depressing answer.
- smitty1e 5y agoMy interest in computing was fueled by the desire to automate games like Car Wars. Interestingly, now that hacking pretty much any of the data management and calculations is not a problem, the desire to sink into some complex game world is gone.
- ourmandave 5y agoFor me it was to automate Ogre, which seems like a logical thing since it's supposed to be a machine. Of course, you can buy it today. https://store.steampowered.com/app/517780/Ogre/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/517780/Ogre/
- smitty1e 5y agoNeat. 25 years ago, on Civ II or III, I blew a gasket on an 18 hour game and haven't been able to play since. He said, proudly frittering away time on social media.
- hkt 5y ago25 years ago would probably have been civ II. Source: I was playing it as a 7 year old and vividly remember learning that the UN was really a thing after building it in game.
- mango7283 5y agoCiv II's wonder video for the UN still gives me chills today, it's the best, that soundtrack and imagery was just evocative. But I do wonder if they intended to be cynical with the ability, which is - ""peacekeeping" - allows a democracy to declare war 50% of the time" :). The game putting scare quotes around "peacekeeping" doesn't help, heh. (Normally a democracy in civ ii cannot declare/start a war, having the UN overrides that.)
- hkt 5y agoHa - as a kid I definitely didn't pick up on that. I just enjoyed collecting wonders and watching all the videos. The UN one was great. I loved the videos from Alpha Centauri too, another Sid Meier contribution. Wonderful games (pun very much intended).
- MrMember 5y agoThe game that famously accounts for Italian soldiers needing more water rations so they could boil their pasta.
- CapricornNoble 5y agoAs soon as I read the headline I knew exactly what game it was, and, having never played it, I only really know it for "the wargame with special rules for Italian pasta". I love these types of games though. Renegade Legion: Prefect is possibly my favorite hexgame, and I spent more hours solo'ing games of Succession Wars than I ever did punching giant robots in the face in actual Battletech.
- pessimizer 5y agoThe unacknowledged secret to a lot of these games are that the maps and the rulebooks were the final product; they weren't really meant to be played, and certainly many were never played before they were published. Plenty of SPI games were absolutely unplayable and hopelessly broken, but you could spend hours upon hours reading the rules, looking at the maps, and going to the library to read more about the battles. If I had to guess, I'd say 98% of all copies of hex+counter wargames are never played, just pored over and dreamed about.
- jleyank 5y agoThey were played then, as the college kids had the time and the lack of distractions. In a few cases, they were played by 10-20 people blind/moderated. Some, yeah, were turkeys but they made games and also games-in-magazines which published a whole lot of stuff. Some, on the other hand, were excellent. Remember, no pc's, no laptop's, no social media and the constant inability of (geeky) college males to score. Gotta do something other than schoolwork.
- vidanay 5y agoHad some great times in college playing Risk. We would set up three or four boards in different rooms and each player was separated and couldn't see each other. We then had "scouts" who went between rooms to provide limited reports about the other armies. There was much beer and weed involved.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoThis sounds like a much improved version of risk.
- drewcoo 5y agoThere were computers, whether at home or at the university. But playing with clever humans is much more challenging and rewarding than playing against a computer. That hasn't changed.
- busyant 5y ago
- seibelj 5y agoI used to spend many weekends playing all manner of extremely complex time-consuming board games. A hobby for the childless. Maybe in the future…
- arnmac 5y agoThis is not true. My father normally crushed my forces in about 5 hours.
- slyall 5y agoYou might be think of a different North Africa based game. Afrika Korps perhaps: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2259/afrika-korps https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2259/afrika-korps
- surfsvammel 5y agoWhy would the length of the campaign deter you from playing it? Isn't it great if you know you have enough content to play the game for the next 20 years? I play Gloomhaven with friends. Since we live in different parts of the country, we only meet up to play twice a year to play. It will take us years to complete Gloomhaven. It's awesome. It means we can just keep playing long into our retirements (at which point we might meet and play more often!)
- mrVentures 5y agoI was personally very unhappy with gloomhaven's decision to spread the content out so wide. I think they could have structured a much stronger game experience if they just focused on a core 10 to 20 modules versus the over 100 they have. Not to say they couldn't include more modules, but when you're trying to progress a storyline it's really frustrating to have multiple sessions (most many hours long) in between you a plot development.
- sdenton4 5y agoEhhhh... The plot in gloomhaven is really pretty minimal. It's a matter bones choose your own adventure stringing together episodes in a fun combat tactics game.
- morelisp 5y agoThe problem is that some of the retirement quests depend heavily on the plot structure - "kill 5 bosses" can be 20 scenarios or 5 scenarios depending on where you are in the campaign. Similarly for some of the monster-specific quests; some even become impossible if you get them too late and don't want to replay old scenarios. I think it would have been better as 8 starting classes, 8 unlockables, and two more compressed campaigns with some other progression compressed accordingly.
- jader201 5y agoBecause time is finite, and if you want to experience other things -- or other board games -- it's hard to justify sinking this much time into a single experience. Maybe some are fine experiencing this one thing over many months/years, but most people (by far, I would guess) would prefer experiencing more of a variety in the limited time we have. Our group is playing Jaws of the Lion, but only play it about once every few months, while still playing several other games in between. But depending on how long a given campaign would take, it might take more than we want to invest in a single game -- in the example of this article, that would take a lifetime for us.
- MikeBVaughn 5y agoGrowing up with PC games, I was always fascinated by wargames as a genre. It seemed like its own little world, largely disjoint from the rest of PC gaming, likely owing to its genesis in tabletop gaming. My understanding is that pretty much from the dawn of the personal computer era, wargamers were already looking at ways to automate and adjucate all the dice-rolling and table lookups that were in many ways inherent in the genre. There's a fantastic strategy gaming podcast, Three Moves Ahead, which had an episode on a game that's considered to be a classic of the "wargame that successfully automates the tabletop experience" subgenre, and it's an interesting listen, if you're into strategy games: https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/korsun-pocket https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/korsun-pocket I've started dabbling in the genre a bit over the past decade - tabletop and computerized - and what really intrigues me is, broadly speaking, there's been a pivot away from complexity in the past few decades, particularly in the tabletop space. If you think of a wargame as a sort of playable model of a conflict, you can look at the gameplay mechanics as a tool for abstracting away or illuminating and emphasizing what people believe are important factors in a battle/war/etc. There's a significant current of thought in modern wargame design circles that believes the old-school rivet-counting complexity you see in the article missed the forest for the trees. So, you instead see games that in clever and elegant ways evoke specific aspects of various conflicts in relatively simple-to-grasp games. On the table-top side, there are quite a few games that have moved to a sort of card-driven model where you play from a hand of hidden cards. In particular, you have things like Twilight Struggle which evokes a specific sense of uncertainty, paranoia, and tension that's quite impressive, especially as the DEFCON counter seems to inexorably creep towards 1. On the PC side, Unity of Command uses a very elegant model of supply chains to evoke how maneuver warfare worked on the Eastern Front in WWII. It's striking how well a collection of rules that can be summarized on a single page manages to result in deep strikes and encirclements of large groups like those you see in military history books. Unity of Command is interesting in that it is a game you could in principle play as a tabletop game - it's just that while the supply chain model is extremely easy to grasp and visualize, it'd be an enormous pain to track manually (Well, that, and you'd miss out on the deviously nasty opponent AI). If you're at all curious about the genre, it's worth a look.
- ekianjo 5y agoNever seen anyone calling a wargame a boardgame. They belong to entirely different categories. Some wargames can last for months indeed.
- morelisp 5y ago> Never seen anyone calling a wargame a boardgame. But they are. Action figures are also dolls. Sorry.
- jtthe13 5y agoReminds me of 'the cones of dunshire'
- filt 5y agoThe title is misleading. There are several board games from the 1970s that takes way less time to complete.
- dugmartin 5y agoWargamers are dedicated folks. My brother has had a nearly continuous series of plays of Third Reich, an Avalon Hill game from the same era, since the early ‘90s. Same group of guys using a special 2x magnified board he had printed and mounted on the wall over a thin sheet of metal so they can use magnetized counter holders. I think they get 3 or 4 completed games in a year meeting once a week.
- SapporoChris 5y agoI recall being warned not to play this game. Warned of people that started and obsessed over it to the exclusion of all else for months at a time. Panzer Leader and Panzer Blitz were recommended instead.