[livrem]

That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.

Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?).

(Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)

[michaelt]

> You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.

I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year.

And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every evening for 4 years.

Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.

[livrem]

That is the modern (well, DnD 3E and later, so this century?) style of RPG campaign, with pre-packaged bundles of adventures to play in series, designed to last some specific time and then it ends. The traditional oldschool form of RPG campaign, still the way many groups play, and definitely the most common form last century (even if there were a few pre-packaged campaign modules for AD&D as well) is to create a group of characters and just keep playing adventure after adventure, more or less connected, replacing characters as they died off or players got bored with their current characters, but not really having a well-defined end, probably just fizzling out in the end as players drop off or the group decide to start a new campaign.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/20/us/dungeons-and-dragons-l...

(A bit extreme maybe, but I heard of shorter campaigns, but still lasting for at least a decade of regular play.)

And I think you underestimate how dedicated some people can be to playing games like CNA. It is a big game, but it is not absurdly long compared to other big board wargames.

Here is a BGG thread from 2010 (well before CNA became a mainstream meme?): https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/580214/

Note how the thread starts out "25 years after playing my last game of CNA".

So called "monster wargames" was a trend around 1980, toward the sudden end of the era of board wargames being almost-mainstream. I do not know if CNA was the biggest of all, but I think not. It was part of starting the trend, but later games were probably bigger and longer.

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/42904/the-biggest-of-the-...

[philwelch]

The actual North Africa campaign lasted a little under three years, let’s round it to 150 weeks. So if you spend less than 10 hours a week playing CNA, your game will take longer than the actual military campaign.

[euroderf]

So the classic quote of "the map is not the territory" comes close to erasure here.

[the_af]

I think a big part of the problem is that Campaign for North Africa is a badly designed wargame, in the sense that it's not abstracted enough.

One of its flaws is that it makes you, in the role of the commander (or one of five commanders, anyway), keep track of:

> "[If using the full rules] every individual plane and pilot in the three year campaign."

This is madness! A real commander wouldn't keep track of this, so why must the player? This level of zoom-in is typical of tactical wargames, where it makes sense, but it's nonsense for traditional "cardboard" grand strategy wargames without computer assistance. So it makes total sense that playing this would take more than the actual Campaign for North Africa, since in the real deal those commanders wouldn't track every individual plane.

I don't think this was made to be actually played, and I struggle to believe anyone has actually finished it, regardless of some internet claims.