Here's What You Need to Know: This board game is fascinating but also very unwieldly and hard to play.

There are countless computer military simulations available that accurately render weapons, vehicles and even the settings of many of the most famous conflicts in history. Yet, missing from even the most “hardcore” of those games are the issues of logistics, supplies and the uncertainty of war. For those armchair generals out there who have some extra time on their hands and desire a real challenge—there is a meticulously detailed table top military board game that has become infamous for its complexity.

More than forty years since it was released, even its designers consider it nearly unplayable, and for those reasons it has become akin to a “White Whale” for the most serious war gamers.

This is The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43, and as the name suggests it 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, but 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.

Hours to Just Set Up

While never a mainstream pastime, the war game market was large enough for a few powerhouse companies to emerge and each tried to outdo its competitors. The Campaign for North Africa became the culmination of creating the most detailed, most complex and most 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 ten 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 $44.00 it went for an unheard-of price for a game at the time and can be bought for about $170 today.

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 that ideally it required ten players—five taking the role of the Allied forces and five playing as 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.

If simply getting nine of your closet war gaming buddies together at the same time already seemed be a monumental challenge, The Campaign for North Africa essentially required that you’d have to do it repeatedly.

It certainly couldn’t be played in a single evening—or even weekend. But there were already games that were designed to be played out over the course of 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 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 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 of old soldiers—were on the decline.

By 1983 SPI was out of business.

End of the Epic War Games

This one game didn’t take down SPI, but it certainly didn’t help 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 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 tomato sauce that came in cans, but for personal reasons he didn’t want another rule on the deployment of cans of 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, but in nearly every aspect of the game play one unlucky player per team had to track fuel evaporation, how many weapons a unit had and other countless details. Today a computer simulation could handle that automatically, but in 1979 it was all about a pen and pencil—and it caused the game play to slow to a crawl.

Over the years even Berg agreed that the game was too difficult to play. Originally, 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, so challenging was the game that even the team making it failed to complete it.

Seriously Complex

The Campaign for North Africa has a weight (complexity rating) of 4.68/5 according to BoardGameGeek.com, which ranks it among the most complex games ever published. Yet, 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 especially detailed recreation of the D-Day invasion, Allied build-up and subsequent Normandy breakout.

As with The Campaign for North Africa, setup also took hours, and unlike many other war games of the era that utilized North Atlantic Treaty Organization symbols to represent units, this one relied on the symbols employed by German World War II situation maps. With more than 1,600 pieces, and with teams of up to four per side controlling the action, this game also required 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.

As noted, 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 difficult to find and used copies sell for hundreds of dollars online.

For those who are determined to attempt The Campaign for North Africa there is good news. This year Decision Games, announced that it would reprint the game and it is expected to be released early next year.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He grew up with military board games but never attempted to take on The Campaign for North Africa.

This article first appeared in December 2020.

Image: Board Game Geek.