There is a World War II board game that lasts 1,500 hours. It is not known if someone has finished it

If you have to regulate that to prepare a board, learn the rules and put the game to invest an afternoon (and peak) with your friends for any board game, ‘The Campaign for North Africa’ It is not for you: a Wargame of mastodontic size whose duration and ambition are so monumental that it came out in an episode of ‘Big Bang Theory’. This is its story (and the time you have to book in your agendas of the next eight years).

Historical context. ‘The Campaign for North Africa’ replicates with painful detail the development of the conflict that took place in North Africa, during World War II, between 1940 and 1943. There were campaigns in the deserts of Libya and Egypt, in Morocco, Algeria (the famous Torch operation) and in Tunisia. The combat occurred mainly between British and German forces, until the United States entered the conflict in 1942.

The longest game ever produced. It is estimated that to play a complete game about 1,500 hours are needed (and has been defined as he Wargame More complex ever edited), and about ten players. It takes place over 100 shifts, each of them equivalent to a week of the real conflict. Combat is the least: here what you have to do is manage resources to an absolutely delusional end. The most famous meme linked to the game to record its psychotic level of detail is that the Italians need extra supplies of water to prepare pasta (in reality, an autoparadical wink of the creator who does not correspond to a real fact).

Each box included, among other things, a map of 3 meters, 1800 cards and six books with rules, historical context and tables. And a dice.

But why. After this nonsense is Richard Berghistorical designer of hundreds of war simulators, not all of World War II: in his curriculum there are games set in ancient Rome, in Waterloo, in the Mexican revolution, in the times of the Highlandersin the Middle Ages, in feudal Japan … This game was born, in reality, as a collaborative project for experts who worked at the editor Simulation Publications Inc. Six months later, the development was so exasperating that Berg had to take the reins, something that took two more years. At the end of that period they were so fed up that they threw it without him (often exhaustive) testing that these titles need to be balanced.

But … Is it good? Not too much: the game came out in 1979, it was not a success of criticism or public, but it arrived at a time when the Wargames They invaded stores every week. Today it is considered more a very heavy joke than anything else (and very expensive: as it has not been reissued, copies are quoted for thousands of euros), but playing it is not especially fun: it consists of calculating percentages all the time to keep the account of how resources are exhausted. It has been as a redoubt for fans who decide to broadcast how they will be its weekends for the next ten years.

Sheldon does like. In the end, the game has remained as a wink for fans with excess of free time, as attesting to its recognized leviísimally autoparadical character. In episode 16 of season 11 of ‘The Big Bang Theory’, Sheldon proposes to your friends Wait for Bernadette to give birth playing ‘The Campaign for North Africa’. Of course, they get bored quickly, but Sheldon has no problem playing their own shifts and those of their rivals. A perfect summary of the crazy dynamics of the wargames as ambitious as this: fascinating as a concept, too demanding in everything else.

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