
A 1979 War-Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Complete - danso
https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-hours-to-compl-1818510912
======
bane
I have a friend, now retired, who's passion is these kinds of games. When he
and his wife retired, they bought a house with a massive basement that he
converted into a full-time wargaming room with space for 3 or 4 of these kinds
of games setup all at once. Once or twice a week, he and a few other retired
friends get together for a few hours and play the game. He has one game that's
been going on about 3 years. His library of these games dates back to the
early 70s and its really quite majestic.

When you see the giant board laid out in its fullest, and the thousands of
pieces each in their individual positions...you get the sense that these would
be almost impossible games to really play adequately on a computer -- until
maybe the hololens. The need to see the context of the entire battlefield is
overwhelming that no amount of scrolling around a screen can really compensate
for it.

Another thing that's not clear for people from the outside is in many cases
how scripted portions of the game are, and its really up to the players to
spend a few hours following the script in between moves. This is supposed to
simulate various historic battlefield conditions like new groups of units
moving on and off the field as the real battle progressed, and the "play"
happens within this framework.

Very deep, very detailed, really fun in a way, and no way could I ever put the
kind of time into it that it needs, even for "small" games.

~~~
KGIII
Some trivia: TSR, original makers of _Dungeons & Dragons_, stood for Tactical
Studies Rules. Rules for the study of tactics, specifically military tactics.
They made wargames before they published D&D.

Somewhere, I should still have a copy of _Cavaliers and Roundheads_. At least
I believe it has survived all the moves.

~~~
jaysonelliot
_Playing at the World_ by Jon Peterson is a fascinating and comprehensive
history of the wargames that led to Dungeons & Dragons, and the early years of
the roleplaying hobby.

I highly recommend it for anyone that likes painstakingly researched details
about the world of games.

~~~
KGIII
It just so happens that I need to go into town on Monday. I'll stop by my
local bookstore and see if they have a copy or if they can order it.

That probably sounds archaic but I try to purchase all my books there. There
aren't many local bookstores left and I'm partial to it, so I hope to help
keep them in business.

Much thanks for the recommendation. I've never read it and I am almost done
with my current nightstand book. (Battle Cry, Leon Uris.) If they don't have
it, they should be able to order it.

~~~
wavefunction
I use Amazon to look up ISBNs so I can order through my local bookseller,
unless it turns out to be a book I can only get through Amazon.

Good for you!

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Falkon1313
I used to love epic monster board wargames in my teens. Advanced 3rd Reich was
my favorite, and when played along with it's companion Empire of the Rising
Sun could simulate all of WWII in about 80 hours or so - assuming you were
completely familiar with about 2000 pages of rules and moving as fast as
possible with little time for strategic thought. Realistically, it could run
significantly longer. But still short enough that you could (and might want
to) play it multiple times in a lifetime. (The current version, updated over
the years, is called A World At War and lists a playtime of 48 hours.)

Some of the very detailed air and naval tactical wargames back then could take
an hour or so to simulate a few seconds or minutes of combat. I tried some of
those and did not particularly enjoy them, but if a computer could help... My
learning to program was significantly driven by making computer-aided-
wargaming assistant software. But before long, PC wargames became more
playable and I started turning to them instead.

As an adult with work and family, I can't play the monsters or rivet-counters
anymore. I have great memories of obsessing over them and all their details
and possibilities. But even now that they're computerized, trying to fit all
that information in my head, handle all the detail and micromanagement feels
too much like work. Such games are works of art that provide a special place
and time and some lasting memories for those who can get into them.

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panzagl
My favorite story about Campaign for North Africa involves a, uh, 'innovative'
solution to the POW problem. As the British roll back the Italians, management
of POWs becomes a large problem, requiring the players to create POW camps in
empty hexes and allocate units to guard them or else they can revolt (as
mentioned in the article). Legend has it that one player was looking over the
terrain and weather rules, and realized he could place the POW camps in hexes
representing dry riverbeds. Come Springtime the hexes would flood, turning
into regular river hexes, and freeing up valuable guard units for other
duties...

~~~
tptacek
So basically Dwarf Fortress is tapping into something fundamental about
simulation gaming.

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greeneggs
Where does the 1500 hours figure come from?

According to Boardgamegeek, "Playing time with 10 players is listed at 1200
hours." At the top of the BGG page, play time is said to be 1000 hours. There
is a thread in their forum asking if anyone has ever finished the game, and
the answer seems to be no.

[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north-
afri...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north-africa)

~~~
afterburner
Playing time predictions are usually on the low side. If the publisher is
claiming 1200 and BGG is claiming 1000, then 1500 is probably a fair guess.

~~~
hudibras
I would go so far as to say that playing time predictions are _always_ on the
low side.

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classicsnoot
A few years back, some friends and I built a modification for Risk. From my
(our) point of view the inherent conceit of Risk is that they more Ts you
control, the more power you have, the easier campaigns become. Typical 19th
century German thinking. The reality is that as you expand, costs go up not
down. With great population comes great Tragedy. So our build included
infrastructure and currency. We only tried it once. I have not spoken with one
of the co-creators since those fateful three days (trans Arctic railroads, it
turns out, are the stuff of ending friendships) but I kept a candle lit for
the day when Hegemon would rise again. I have the rule book squirreled away on
a HD somewhere. I'd love to give it another go.

The core concept of the game was you go online, download the rule book for
free, donate if you want, and use the pieces from other board games to play.
If it caught on, we'd create an option to buy a custom made game (utilizing
the Dymaxion Map and 3D printed pieces). Such are the dreams of youth.

~~~
daemin
That's the same sort of thing that comes with computer games that have
implemented the Risk model, ones such as the Total War series and the Paradox
games like Europa Universalis. Effectively there has to be some other mechanic
that taxes you the larger you get and the more careful you have to be with
expanding as you get some model of "Internal strife" to deal with.

~~~
classicsnoot
Our addition was that you do not have to keep units in acquired territory, and
each T gains you one unit per turn. in this way, you can keep one army
stationed there free of charge. if you start building up your army, there is a
cost to build AND station them. Movement had a cost, so you are motivated to
build infrastructure that would reduce this cost. Building a capitol in a T
mitigates the cost of storing armies in said T. Capitols were expensive and
transferable. Ditto for infrastructure, though not as expensive.

My dreams for the game were to be able to build up scenarios or start from
scratch. Each team in Scratch Mode starts with one T, one capitol, and five
armies. Certain Ts produce a lot of income (simulating oil, mining value, or
agriculture) while other Ts were constant deficits (if they border X+1 other
Ts OR if the only had one connection).

I forgot to list the victory conditions: you must control 75% of the economy,
territories, or military, or 51% of all three. In my mind, the goal was to
form a global coalition and sign a peace treaty (game over... for now...((cue
Red Alert HELL MARCH music))) or beat everyone into submission.

We used the Dymaxion Map in our modeling because it was fun and different, but
as stated previously, the game was really the Rule Book, so one could
conceivably use map, or chess board, or living room with furniture + a
ruler/yardstick.

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zo7
It sounds like this game was rushed, but it sounds like an interesting
challenge: how do you design a game that takes a significant amount of time to
play, while still ensuring that it would be balanced and engaging for all of
the players throughout? There'd probably have to be some sort of computer
simulation involved or some expedited way to play it, but how would you
measure these things? Is it even possible?

~~~
jerf
Well, a certain degenerate case of "balance" can be obtained with simple
symmetry. It isn't quite the totality of what people mean by the concept
because there are plenty of abstract games in which once one competitor has an
advantage, they can inevitably press it home to a victory, and most humans
would probably call that "unbalanced", even though in some sense it isn't. But
still, a symmetric game certainly starts you off with a solid start in that
direction.

(Technically, perfect play in a non-randomized game determines the winner very
rapidly, and even in randomized games there's a clear maximum probability
path. However, perfect play is generally humanly-infeasible and may even be
computationally infeasible; chess is a relatively simple game compared to most
and we still don't know who wins or draws with perfect play.)

Engaging 10 people for 1500 hours is probably effectively impossible, though.
At that point you'd basically be selecting the people and building the game to
match, if a solution even existed.

(You may be thinking "Oh, but jerf, there are people who play 1500 hours of
Team Fortress 2 and stuff", but my reply is that if you designed TF2 for this
use case and picked 10 random people, even 10 random TF2 players, you'd have
to be pretty lucky to get 1500 hours for all 10 of them. I'm sure there's well
more than 10 people with that much time clocked but they're still the
outliers, and you'd have a hard time naming them before the fact. Even with
prior information about their addictiveness and tendency to stick with games.)

~~~
Cyph0n
Funny that you picked TF2 as an example.

From my experience with the game over the course of several years, TF2 becomes
insanely addictive only after you overcome the horrendous learning curve.

This takes around 50-100 hours of pure playtime on average.

Once you understand the game mechanics, how to play the classes reasonably
well (fully mastering a class can take 100+ hours), how trading works, and how
to play the most popular game modes (including duos, 4v4, dodgeball, bball,
MGE, surf, etc.), you're basically set for life!

For those who overcome the curve, the retention rate is quite high, from my
experience at least. The release of Overwatch probably pulled quite a few
people over though. This is primarily due to how Valve has treated the game
over the years.

I have over 1000 hours, my brother has twice that (at least), and I know
several people I played with regularly who had 4000+. Keep in mind that the
country that I was living in had an absurdly small TF2 community.

I don't play anymore because: (1) I don't have a good PC, and (2) grad school
sucks.

~~~
jerf
"I have over 1000 hours, my brother has twice that (at least), and I know
several people I played with regularly who had 4000+."

Oh, I picked that carefully. TF2, Starcraft, Diablo, the more successful
MMOs... certainly people can pour thousands into those.

First, I guarantee you that for every person you can find with 1000 hours in
TF2, there are dozens or possibly even hundreds of people who installed it,
screwed around for a few dozen hours or fewer, and then left. So if you
randomly select 10 TF2 players, even if I spot you "from the set of all people
with more than 5 hours in the game", the odds that you'll come up with a set
of 10 people who are ready to put 1500 hours into "one game" are actually
pretty dismal.

Secondly, I'd also very, very seriously question whether that constitutes "one
game" in the way that this game really is _one_ game, with one team winning,
after 1500 hours. TF2 is more a series of games that last about an hour. I've
played far less than 1500 hours on TF2, and I "won" and "lost" dozens of times
each. MMOs may lack quite the same degree of clarity but one could probably
say that "one quest" is a game, or some other larger subdivision like "all the
quests in one area" or "a single raid", but generally if an MMO does have a
quest that lasts for even a hundred hours it's going to be considered by the
players as a long-term adjunct quest rather than "the thing I do for 100
hours". There have been enough MMOs out there that somebody might be able to
cite a counterexample, but it would be rare. At the very least an MMO player
playing one MMO for 1500 hours is probably going to be running multiple
characters, which would be reasonably called "separate games".

There may be individual Civ games that ran that long, like maybe the Eternal
War:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/](https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/)
(The original post the guy doesn't claim a game time, just that he'd been
playing for 10 years.) But, again, trying to get 10 such people together would
be a challenge.

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cyberferret
Wow, and I thought our 8 hour games of Axis & Allies or Shogun were epic. I do
remember one game of A&A which went for 3 days once.

But a big factor of all those games was the banter and chatter that took place
in between the play rounds - which easily took up >50% of 'game time'.

Discussions about famous war heroes, tactics, politics, geography and purely
made up stories to rationalise our game play was what made those sessions
special, and stand out in my mind FAR more than the die rolls, cards or token
that we had...

~~~
jbattle
Shogun was the best and the worst of those gamemaster games. I thought the
flexibility of the rules (bidding for turn order, the ninja, experience for
generals, etc) was way ahead of its time. But in our games, whichever player
left the early game with the right side of the board was almost guaranteed to
win.

~~~
cyberferret
I always found that an odd number of players yielded best result with Shogun.
With 4 players, it always became a 2 on 2 situation. With 3 or 5, there was
far more interesting conflict and changing of fortune.

I loved that every game was so different, but yes, the initial random deal of
starting provinces could make or break the entire game. Also found that it
made a huge difference if you went first in the first round, then last on
every round afterwards.

But even with all that, Shogun is still one of my favourite board war games
ever. Still have my original set from >30 years ago, back when I think it was
still a Milton Bradley game(?)

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SwellJoe
1,500 hours? That's nothing! These guys should give Civilization a go. (I say
this only partially in jest. I've logged a few thousand hours playing the
various Civs over the years. And, I'm not even a heavy player, compared to
many.)

~~~
codingdave
It does tell the tale of how gaming has changed over time -- 1500 hours was
truly considered a lifetime of play a few decades ago. The article itself laid
out what was considered reasonable - 3 hour sessions twice a month, with
friends. Today, people can do 3 hour sessions twice a day. Alone.

~~~
II2II
Would things have been different 40 years ago if solo gaming was practical?
Getting half a dozen people together for 3 hour sessions is difficult to do
once a week, never mind twice a day. Playing these board games alone would
have been more of a research project than entertainment.

I recall bringing a then-obsolete Mac SE into a private student lounge about
20 years ago. One of the games installed on it was Harpoon, which seems to be
in the spirit of these old board games. Almost no one was interested in it. I
had installed it because it was a novelty. One student played it ravenously.
It leaves me wondering what computer gaming would be like if it focused upon
detailed simulations rather than graphics and reflexes.

~~~
codingdave
If you think solo gaming wasn't practical 40 years ago, you weren't around 40
years ago. Those Atari 2600s rocked our world, man.

But the change that really started to make people put games first in their
lives was when it became social -- MUDs/MUSHes. When you could interact with
other people through the game, that is when people started to play them all
night and fail out of school because of them, etc.

~~~
jhbadger
Well, the games on the 2600 were simple shootemups and the like requiring
little AI, not solo play of serious games like this. But by the mid 1980s
wargames with reasonably capable computer opponents were available.

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J_cst
Yep we enjoy our pasta, a bit sad that we're always caged into this "pasta,
pizza, mafia" storytelling :/ but probably it's our fault!

~~~
jaggederest
I always thought it was kind of funny that Italy was famous for new-world and
relatively recent concepts. Tomatoes definitively didn't exist in the old
world before 1500ad and _la Cosa Nostra_ only emerged in the 18th century, in
the same vein as the Bow Street Runners in the UK.

Of course pasta existed before tomatoes were available, as in things like
Bolognese sauce, but it's still a strong association.

~~~
thiagoharry
Well, Italy is also a new and recent country.

~~~
J_cst
Yep, only if you really believe that Italy's "birthday" is 1861... :) I humbly
suggest that there's something more than that if you look closely!

~~~
walterstucco
1870 is the real one, with the Capture of Rome when Rome was annexed to
kingdom of Italy.

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powera
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Universalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Universalis)
is a slightly more approachable (and very slightly shorter) game along these
lines.

~~~
mcguire
Before i clicked, i thought you might be referring to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Day_%28game%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Day_%28game%29)

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firethief
Would this be less or more insane if transfered to a computer? It sounds like
most of the tedium is computing and tabulating, but is that also most of the
draw?

~~~
WesleyLivesay
Far less. It does not seem any more complex than something like Gary Gigsby's
War in the West and while it has a hill to climb if you want to learn how to
play it, it is far from a 1500 hour game.

------
pavel_lishin
> _they said ‘but we’re still playtesting it! We don’t know if it’s balanced
> or not. It’s gonna take seven years to play!’ And I said ‘you know what, if
> someone tells you it’s unbalanced, tell them ‘we think it’s your fault, play
> it again.’”_

I wonder if "have you tried turning it off and back on again" was in popular
use for computers at this time.

~~~
digi_owl
Well for home computers at least the way to get it to load a new program was
to kill the power.

The institutional ones probably had uptimes measured in months though.

You didn't just reboot something that multiple people, including senior staff
and tenured professors, may be using...

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c3534l
I really want the rights to this so I can make it a videogame that only takes
a few hundred hours to complete.

~~~
catacombs
Someone already beat you to it. It's called Hearts of Iron 4:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/Hearts_of_Iron_IV/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/Hearts_of_Iron_IV/)

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jakebasile
And here I thought the article would be about Monopoly.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Please, no family play-through of Monopoly lasts for longer than three hours -
that's the _maximum_ amount of time before mom locks herself in the bathroom
to chainsmoke, and dad begins to angrily saw apart random wood in the garage,
leaving the children to form grudges that will last well into their 40s.

~~~
sethrin
The game's popularity is sort of ironic. It was designed to be unfair, in
order to demonstrate the harmful power that monopolists accrue. That it
results in the situations you describe could also be said to be by design.

