Somewhere on a shelf - dusty, shrink-wrapped, possibly never opened - sits The Campaign for North Africa - like a dare.
Published in 1979 and designed by the legendary wargame architect Richard Berg, it's widely considered the most complex and longest board game ever made. Not longest as in "a good long afternoon with some beers." Longest as in a few decades if you show up to your gaming group twice a month for a full sesh. For context, the actual North African campaign - the one with real tanks, soldiers and consequences - lasted about three years.
And there's no recorded instance of anyone ever actually finishing it. Not one completed game - anywhere.
The reason for the absurdly long playtime isn't so much complexity of strategy as it is sheer, grinding bookkeeping. Every action - every single step of every action - requires you to record data, make calculations, and update your logs. Forget Twilight Imperium. This is something else entirely: a bureaucratic simulation of modern war so fastidious in its operational detail that it bends back around into a kind of outsider art. 1d6chan
Berg didn't stumble into this. He walked in with his eyes open. The game was part of SPI's "Heuristic Intensive Manual Simulation Series," a response to feedback from players who wanted something massive. Berg started with a team of developers; six months later, everyone else had quietly walked out. He finished it alone. Wikipedia
The game never received the testing required to iron out the inconsistencies and balance issues that are usually present in a freshly inked rulebook. Berg didn't care. When his publisher at SPI told him they couldn't release it yet because playtesting wasn't complete, Berg reportedly replied: "You know what, if someone tells you it's unbalanced, tell them 'we think it's your fault, play it again.'" How do you argue with that? Kotaku1d6chan
You might be forgiven for thinking this was a prank - a satirical broadside against the era's arms race of complexity in wargaming. The 1970s had seen board games balloon into what the hobby called "monster games": rulebooks the length of novels, historical analysis booklets, logistics charts, hundreds upon hundreds of counters, and bookkeeping that would make a tax accountant weep. The genre had a way of mistaking density for depth. Berg's creation looks, from a distance, like a reductio ad absurdum of the whole thing - the board game equivalent of Piero Manzoni's Merda d'Artista, 90 tin cans allegedly filled with the artist's own shit, produced in 1961 as an act of provocation against the art world's bottomless appetite for consuming whatever it was told was valuable. One tin eventually sold at auction in Milan for €275,000. The joke, if it was a joke, was on the buyer. But I digress. WikiArtWikipedia
Berg was deadly serious. He described the game as "an intensive simulation manual," pushed to what he openly called "wretched excess" - and he meant it as a compliment. This wasn't mockery. It was logistical realism pushed to its ideological extreme.
The rule most people cite first is the pasta rule - officially entry 52.6, known with affection as the "macaroni rule." Italian troops were outfitted with noodle rations, and in the name of historical dogma, the player responsible for the Italians must distribute an extra water ration to their forces so that their pasta may be boiled. Soldiers who do not receive their "pasta point" may immediately become disorganized, rendering them useless in the field. If the Italians can't boil their pasta, the Italians desert. The Romans marched half the known world into submission on hardtack and spite, but deny a man his penne and he's done for. Kotaku
But here's the punchline: Berg himself admitted the rule wasn't based on historical reality. It was a joke he included to lampoon the absurdity of his own creation. The pasta rule is the least realistic thing in a game supposedly obsessed with realism. Quarter to Three
Because everything else is real. Frighteningly, tediously, soul-grindingly real.
Consider fuel. You must calculate evaporation rates for the fuel that powers your war machinery. Not just a flat rate - evaporation changes depending on the type of container and the weather conditions that day. The weather conditions you must determine first, which is itself a process that takes the better part of a day. So before your tanks can move, before a single shot is fired, you have become a meteorologist. You check the sky over the Western Desert, you consult your charts, you calculate how many litres of petrol have quietly cooked off in the afternoon heat - and then, and only then, do you figure out how far you can actually drive.
But the real knife in the back is the supply chain. Supply trucks consume supplies while transporting supplies. The logistics chain can partially eat itself just by existing. Your meticulous quartermaster - the one who factored in the evaporation rates, who calculated fuel expenditure against distance, who has his entire manifest colour-coded and cross-referenced - can have the whole beautiful system collapse because he neglected to pack a spare tire. Breakdown on the road. Column halted. The sand doesn't care about your spreadsheets.
And even if the supplies survive the journey, they still have to get off the boat. Port capacity is modelled with such granularity that unloading bottlenecks can cripple entire offensives even when the convoys have technically arrived. Picture it: months of planning, a full convoy steaming into Benghazi harbour - fuel, ammunition, food, replacement vehicles, spare parts, and yes, actual camels and mules for the final push inland - and the whole offensive grinds to a halt because the docks are running at reduced capacity. One too many dockers on a long lunch break. One foreman looking the other way. A bottleneck so complete that the war effort, in all its thousands of hours of careful management, seizes up in a harbour queue.
That's when you send in the camels.
This is, at its heart, what The Campaign for North Africa is about. Not heroism, not tactics, not the romance of desert warfare. It's about the grinding, unglamorous machinery of war - the water allocation forms and fuel receipts and port schedules upon which every offensive ultimately depends. Berg understood, perhaps better than any other game designer before or since, that wars are not won by generals alone. They are won or lost by those filing the paperwork.