The Endless Battle: The war game that takes 62 days to play

Editor’s note: Last year in these pages, Matt Doherty offered a round-up on the rise and fall of historical wargames, and in it he included what has been described as easily the most complicated game ever made. Here is a bit more history on “The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43.”

Nearly 50 years after its release, even its designers consider it nearly unplayable, and for that reason, it has become akin to a “White Whale” for the most serious war gamers.

 “The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43”, as the name suggests, covers the operations in Libya and North Africa during the Second World War in detail like no game before and certainly none since.

This ambitious board game was developed by the now-defunct publisher Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) in the late 1970s. Today, such a decision might be questioned. Still, in addition to being the era of disco, high inflation, and an energy crisis, it is also remembered as the heyday of epic military board games.

While never a mainstream pastime, the war game market was large enough to support a few powerhouse companies, each of which tried to outdo its competitors. The Campaign for North Africa culminated in the creation of the most detailed, complex, and epic war game ever produced.

It was as grand in scale as the campaign it recreated.

The game featured a map that was a full 10 feet long, included 1,600 cardboard counters, and dozens of charts that tabulate everything from damage to morale and to mechanical failure. The rules, which are among the most complex of any game ever published, came in three volumes! When it was published in 1979, The Campaign for North Africa cost $44, an unheard of price for a game at the time. 

Richard Berg, the lead designer, reportedly described it as “wretched excess”, but added that “it was designed specifically as such.”

As with many World War II games, it could be played by two players, but the designers suggested, ideally, it required 10 players – five taking the role of the Allied forces and five playing as the Axis.

Gamers would be appointed Front-line and Air Commanders, who then issued orders to the units, while the Rear and Logistics Commanders handled supplies and logistics. A Commander-in-Chief was assigned to lord over the other players on his/her team and was responsible for the macro-level strategic decisions.

Getting nine of your closest war gaming buddies together at the same time already seemed a monumental challenge; yet, The Campaign for North Africa required that you do it repeatedly.

It certainly couldn’t be played in a single evening – or even weekend. But there were already games designed to be played over multiple weekends. This one took that concept to the extreme.

To play the game to completion could take up to 1,500 hours – and as War Is Boring noted, “If you and nine friends play it as a full-time job for eight hours per day for five days a week, you’re looking at 30 weeks.”

Not surprisingly, when The Campaign for North Africa was released in 1979, it was far from a hit, and timing was certainly against such a monstrosity of a war game. Video games were already on the rise in the late 1970s, with the Atari 2600 home game console arriving in 1977, and soon, personal computers would arrive and displace the cardboard pieces.

Additionally, board games also underwent a significant change in the 1980s with the arrival of Trivial Pursuit in 1981. Soon after, the days of beer-and-pretzel war games played by a unique group of mostly adult men, commonly known as “grognards” – a term for old soldiers – were on the decline.

 By 1983, SPI was out of business.

This one game didn’t take down SPI, but it certainly didn’t help the company to publish a game that even the designers noted was unplayable and filled with rules that seem needlessly complex and yet arguably historically inaccurate. Among those was the requirement that Italian troops be supplied with a “noodle ration,” which required that players must distribute extra water rations to those units or else they become “disorganized” and their morale suffers.

As the gaming news website Kotaku reported, “It was really an in-game joke.” Berg admitted that the Italian Army would have cooked pasta in canned tomato sauce, but, for personal reasons, he didn’t want another rule on the deployment of canned tomato sauce, so the water ration was used instead!

That sort of near-absurdity of The Campaign for North Africa has made it a cult classic – even collectible, if not exactly playable.

The game also gained a new following after it was featured in a 2018 episode of the CBS sitcom” The Big Bang Theory”, where the socially awkward Sheldon Cooper tries to convince his friends to play it even as he describes The Campaign for North Africa as needlessly complex.

It isn’t just the pasta rule; in nearly every aspect of gameplay, one unlucky player per team had to track fuel evaporation, how many weapons a unit had, ammunition supplies, and countless other details. Today, a computer simulation could handle that automatically, but in 1979, it was all about a pen and pencil – and it slowed gameplay to a crawl.

Over the years, even Berg came to agree that the game was too challenging to play. What is noteworthy is that he wasn’t the original designer.

Initially, he was brought in to design the map, but was then charged with finishing the game after the other designers dropped out. He spent two years completing the infamous war game, which was actually published without play testing ever being completed.

In other words, the game was so challenging that even the team making it failed to complete it.

The Campaign for North Africa has a weight (complexity rating) of 4.68/5 on BoardGameGeek.com, which ranks it among the most complex games ever published – but not the most, as it seems. Moreover, the difficulty in playing isn’t what makes it a bad game – there are plenty of games nearly as complex that have become popular among today’s hardcore gamers.

In 1979, SPI rival Avalon Hill, which is today owned by Hasbro, released another massively detailed World War II war game fittingly titled “The Longest Day”. Unplayable in a single day, it also featured a massive board and was an exceptionally detailed recreation of the D-Day invasion, the Allied build-up, and the subsequent Normandy breakout.

As with The Campaign for North Africa, setup also took hours, and unlike many other war games of the era that used NATO symbols to represent units, this one relied on the symbols used on German World War II situation maps. With more than 1,600 pieces and teams of up to four per side controlling the action, this game also took days to play. However, The Longest Day could actually be played to completion in just 100 hours – perhaps even playable over a long holiday break.

Despites its complexity, The Campaign for North Africa has become a cult classic even if it is unplayable. Across gaming forums, many have expressed a desire just to see if they can take in the rules and start the game. As a result, it has become increasingly challenging to find and use copies, which sell for hundreds of dollars online.

For those determined to attempt The Campaign for North Africa, there is good news. Decision Games acquired the rights to The Campaign for North Africa and, in 2016-2017, began streamlining and simplifying the rules, with an advertised publication date of 2020 for the re-titled North African Campaign. In December 2024, the game was slated for play-testing. Perhaps we’ll finally see it this year!  

Author’s Note: Even as I have played military board games much of my life, I’ve never attempted to take on ‘The Campaign for North Africa’. Is anyone game?

We know you love military history and vehicles, but do you collect anything else? Ever wonder about the baseball cards in a box in the basement or Grandma’s old coins in a jar?  Do you love old cars or spin vinyl? Head on over to Collect.com and see what you are missing. Collect.com is the who, what, when and where of the collecting world! https://www.collect.com/