4 ms·

>A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which y

>A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which you must leave the game out and setup for an extended period of time. The Campaign for North Africa is probably the most extreme example of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Afric... A "proper" game requires 10 players and an estimated 1500 hours.

the_af 2y ago
I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the author. Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.
- irrational 2y ago
  Well, there is the recording of Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory.
- livrem 2y ago
  That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign. Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_Africa:_The_Desert_War_1940-43 https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?). (Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign. I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year. And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every evening for 4 years. Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.
    - philwelch 2y ago
      The actual North Africa campaign lasted a little under three years, let’s round it to 150 weeks. So if you spend less than 10 hours a week playing CNA, your game will take longer than the actual military campaign.
      - euroderf 2y ago
        So the classic quote of "the map is not the territory" comes close to erasure here.
      - the_af 2y ago
        I think a big part of the problem is that Campaign for North Africa is a badly designed wargame, in the sense that it's not abstracted enough. One of its flaws is that it makes you, in the role of the commander (or one of five commanders, anyway), keep track of: > "[If using the full rules] every individual plane and pilot in the three year campaign." This is madness! A real commander wouldn't keep track of this, so why must the player? This level of zoom-in is typical of tactical wargames, where it makes sense, but it's nonsense for traditional "cardboard" grand strategy wargames without computer assistance. So it makes total sense that playing this would take more than the actual Campaign for North Africa, since in the real deal those commanders wouldn't track every individual plane. I don't think this was made to be actually played, and I struggle to believe anyone has actually finished it, regardless of some internet claims.
    - 2y ago
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  That's a common issue in 4X games (in a much less extreme form of course), doesn't mean they aren't games, or even bad games. P.S.: related : https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/ > [...] > Because getting seven friends together in the same room for the all-day affair that was a complete game of Diplomacy was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today, inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post; the first example of this breed would seem to date from 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-post games with new themes which shared some commonalities of approach with Calhamer’s magnum opus. > Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-by-post game called Xeno, whose concept sounds very familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started with a cluster of five planets — a tiny toehold in a sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized. > [...] > In practice, Xeno played out at a pace to which the word “glacial” hardly does justice. The game didn’t really get started until September of 1967, and by a year after that just three turns had been completed. I don’t know whether a single full game of it was ever finished. Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post enthusiasts. The first similar game, called Galaxy and run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before Xeno had processed its third turn. > [...]
  - the_af 2y ago
    Agreed, but do most 4X games even have an endgame? Many sandbox games are endless by design, and the intersection of sandbox & 4X seems to be pretty big. I think it's different to CfNA in that this game simulates an actual campaign with clear goals, but that endgame cannot be reached in a reasonable time by any owner of this piece of cardboard. I'd say that's bad game design...
    - BlueTemplar 2y ago
      Well, yes, they do, for instance later Civilizations even provide multiple kinds of conditions for winning the game ! (Though in most playthroughs, the game will be clearly won or lost way before the endgame, especially in SP you often just declare the game 'won' because it's clear nobody will be able to catch up any more, and "shooting fish in a barrel" is only fun the first few times.) Sandbox doesn't mean no end goal(s), though you typically get the option to continue playing past the end goal(s).
9dev 2y ago
The masochist in me wants to build a program to simulate the game and see how fast a computer can do it…

the_af 2y ago

I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the author. Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.

irrational 2y ago
Well, there is the recording of Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory.
livrem 2y ago
That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign. Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_Africa:_The_Desert_War_1940-43 https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?). (Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)
- michaelt 2y ago
  > You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign. I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year. And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every evening for 4 years. Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.
  - philwelch 2y ago
    The actual North Africa campaign lasted a little under three years, let’s round it to 150 weeks. So if you spend less than 10 hours a week playing CNA, your game will take longer than the actual military campaign.
    - euroderf 2y ago
      So the classic quote of "the map is not the territory" comes close to erasure here.
    - the_af 2y ago
      I think a big part of the problem is that Campaign for North Africa is a badly designed wargame, in the sense that it's not abstracted enough. One of its flaws is that it makes you, in the role of the commander (or one of five commanders, anyway), keep track of: > "[If using the full rules] every individual plane and pilot in the three year campaign." This is madness! A real commander wouldn't keep track of this, so why must the player? This level of zoom-in is typical of tactical wargames, where it makes sense, but it's nonsense for traditional "cardboard" grand strategy wargames without computer assistance. So it makes total sense that playing this would take more than the actual Campaign for North Africa, since in the real deal those commanders wouldn't track every individual plane. I don't think this was made to be actually played, and I struggle to believe anyone has actually finished it, regardless of some internet claims.
  - 2y ago
BlueTemplar 2y ago
That's a common issue in 4X games (in a much less extreme form of course), doesn't mean they aren't games, or even bad games. P.S.: related : https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/ > [...] > Because getting seven friends together in the same room for the all-day affair that was a complete game of Diplomacy was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today, inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post; the first example of this breed would seem to date from 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-post games with new themes which shared some commonalities of approach with Calhamer’s magnum opus. > Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-by-post game called Xeno, whose concept sounds very familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started with a cluster of five planets — a tiny toehold in a sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized. > [...] > In practice, Xeno played out at a pace to which the word “glacial” hardly does justice. The game didn’t really get started until September of 1967, and by a year after that just three turns had been completed. I don’t know whether a single full game of it was ever finished. Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post enthusiasts. The first similar game, called Galaxy and run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before Xeno had processed its third turn. > [...]
- the_af 2y ago
  Agreed, but do most 4X games even have an endgame? Many sandbox games are endless by design, and the intersection of sandbox & 4X seems to be pretty big. I think it's different to CfNA in that this game simulates an actual campaign with clear goals, but that endgame cannot be reached in a reasonable time by any owner of this piece of cardboard. I'd say that's bad game design...
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Well, yes, they do, for instance later Civilizations even provide multiple kinds of conditions for winning the game ! (Though in most playthroughs, the game will be clearly won or lost way before the endgame, especially in SP you often just declare the game 'won' because it's clear nobody will be able to catch up any more, and "shooting fish in a barrel" is only fun the first few times.) Sandbox doesn't mean no end goal(s), though you typically get the option to continue playing past the end goal(s).

9dev 2y ago

The masochist in me wants to build a program to simulate the game and see how fast a computer can do it…