Board games that take forever to play.

[Cyberzombie]

There are a number of games I have played and liked -- or played and hated -- that take fuckin' FOREVER to play.  The bad ones, it's a good thing; gives me a great excuse not to play them.  The good ones, though, it makes me sad not to play more often.

Civilization: Before Sid Meyer came along, Civilization was a board game.  (I understand there is a board game based on the computer game, with approximately 10 billion pieces, but that's not what I'm talking about.)  Civ was a blast, especially with the Advanced expansion set.  It had a much shorter time period than the computer game -- all in the ancient world.  You *could not* take over the world militarily -- you didn't have enough game pieces.  The game centered on trading.  In the trading deck, though, were disasters.  And we're not talking the piddly ass disasters of the computer game -- we're talking about disasters that could wipe out 2/3rds of your empire in a turn.  Unfortunately, I never bought my own copy.  

History of the World -- something along the same vein.  There are 7 turns, though, in different historical eras.  The weird thing about that game, though, is that you play an entirely different, random civilization each era, and there's a decent chance at least some of your pieces from earlier eras will still be in play.  It's incredibly chaotic but incredibly fun.

Titan -- here's one on the crappy side.  If you don't understand the strategy and set up your game pieces poorly, you will have lost the game at the outset.  There will be no way you can catch up.  Unfortunately, the only way you can *actually* lose is if you leader token is killed by another player.  Since movement is random, there's no telling how long it will take for them to catch up with you.  And even if you're doing crappy, you'll probably win the first time your leader is attacked, unless they happen to get you with their leader.  I played this dog of a game three times, I think, and the third I just got up and left after 6 hours.  I'd rather watch an Oprah marathon than ever play that dog again.


So, what are y'all's experiences with marathon-length board games?

[Dacke]

Civ was a blast, especially with the Advanced expansion set.  [...] Unfortunately, I never bought my own copy.  

Advanced Civilization is one of my favoritest games ever. I like it so much that I went to the trouble of making my own copy from stuff on the Internet. Unfortunately, most of my current gaming group are a bunch of pussies who don't feel like devoting an entire afternoon and evening to a board game.

As for games that take a LONG time to play, the worst I've played in that regard is Empires in Arms. I've actually never finished it. It's a game that takes place in Europe (and a little into Asia and North Africa), 1805-1815, right when Napoleon was at his coolest. There are seven major powers controlled by players (there are rules for how to handle non-player powers too): France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, Turkey, Russia, and Spain. Each of these has a ton of small piddly counters for various armies, navies, supply trains, garrisons, control of minor countries, and so on. There are rules for diplomacy, finances, alliances, declaring war, peace treaties, and all sorts of other things as well.

One turn can easily take over an hour, especially if there's a war going on between two or more of the major powers. Back when I was in high school, my old gaming group and I would often try to play this on week-long school holidays, starting on Saturday or Sunday and planning to play all week long.

Inevitably, at the start of the game, one nation would take a big beating (usually Prussia, Austria, or Russia). For some reason, the player of that nation would suddenly remember a pressing engagement to do something else on Monday or Tuesday, thereby ruining the game for everyone. I don't think we ever played past the end of 1807 or so, probably not even THAT long.

[BOZ]

depending on how the dice roll and what strategies people take, even Monopoly and Risk can be long games.    of course, once you add in the "extra connecting board" concept, things get even crazier...

[Basara_549]

As a fan of train games, I note that nearly every one in the 18xx family of games is a 6-10 hour affair - which is why I typically avoid them at tournaments.

The Empire Builder family of games (crayon games like EB, Eurorails, etc., where you draw your rail lines as the game progresses) can take less than 2 hours with a group of experienced players, but add indecisive players, or really rotten luck, and a game might take over 4 hours.

One of the ironies of the whole thing is Avalon Hill's Rail Baron. Hasbro refuses to re-release the game because "it takes too long to play". Considering that it takes 2-4 hours (can be as little as 1, but that's rare), they apparently think that going over 2 hours is too long - when, except at Gen Con tournaments, I've never been in a Monopoly game that was shorter than my longest-ever RB game. And, fans actually produced a licensed version of Rail Baron as a computer game - and the COMPUTER version of RB takes, on average, TEN TO FIFTEEN MINUTES per game, as the computer automates the die rolls, destination lookups, and selection of the best, cheapest, routes to use to get from start city to destination city.

[The Good Assyrian]

Civilization

Civilization has the dubious honor of being my personal "Bataan Death March" gaming experience.  Let's just say that it wasn't the best idea to start playing at 10:00 PM on a Friday night at Origins.  The even worse idea was to play for money...

You know how tight things can get in the last couple of turns?  When it is 9:00 the next morning and you've got money on the line, people can get mighty cranky.

TGA

[The Good Assyrian]

As for games that take a LONG time to play, the worst I've played in that regard is Empires in Arms. I've actually never finished it.

Yeah, you have to be planning for the long haul when you break out Empires in Arms.  The group I used to play with regularly met once a week for 4-6 hours, and our games would take many months.  Often the game would be called well before 1815 when it became blindingly obvious that either the French of British player had royally fucked up and was not going to recover, but we came very close to completion several times.  We hit the 1813-14 mark a couple of times.  I was younger and had more free time back then...

Another monster game that we played a couple of times was the infamous Federation and Empire from Task Force Games.  Basically, a strategic game brought to you by the same people who designed Star Fleet Battles.  Needless to say, it was complex and took some time to play!  Months, in fact.

I would also mention the World War 2 monster game World In Flames, but since it was so totally broken we never played it for long.:heh:

TGA

[Name Lips]

Try a 7 player game of Catan, with Seafarers and Cities and Knights expansions.

We've had regular, vanilla games take 3 hours.

We've had just Seafarers or Cities and Knights take 4 hours.

I can't imagine how long it would take if we combined the two. :eek:

[Knightcrawler]

Arkham Horror with a full load of players.  Same pretty much applies to Risk 2210 and History of teh World.  Very enjoyable way to waste a long evening.  

[Hastur T. Fannon]

Talisman? With the expansions and the "Chaos Bloodbath option"?  At least that's fun right up until the last turn

[Settembrini]

Try a 7 player game of Catan, with Seafarers and Cities and Knights expansions.

Don´t. Do. It.
Been there, suffered that.

[Settembrini]

Most boring:

Attack! with Expansion.

You will only have about 4 Turns, waiting 1,5 h for each of them.

[Eli the Vile]

Good Gravy, I am surprised no one has mentioned the granddaddy of super long board games, SUPREMECY!

When you add on all the expansions and have 5+ players that frigging game can go for weeks.

[Dr_Avalanche]

Fortunately (for me at least) is that most of the games in this thread simply aren't that fun - I can live with not having time to play Supremacy or the crayon rail games. Civilization is a damn shame though - I would almost be up for wasting an entire day from sometime before noon until bedtime for a game of Civ if I knew we had a full table of reliable players, which *never* happens.  There is always someone who's running late to the game, who has to suddenly take a break in the middle of the game to drive his sister to work, or decides halfway through that he can't win so he's going to act kingmaker.

I still want to play Struggle of Empires though... At least that's just 3-4 hours,  not 12...

[Eli the Vile]

Fortunately (for me at least) is that most of the games in this thread simply aren't that fun - I can live with not having time to play Supremacy or the crayon rail games. Civilization is a damn shame though - I would almost be up for wasting an entire day from sometime before noon until bedtime for a game of Civ if I knew we had a full table of reliable players, which *never* happens.  There is always someone who's running late to the game, who has to suddenly take a break in the middle of the game to drive his sister to work, or decides halfway through that he can't win so he's going to act kingmaker.

I still want to play Struggle of Empires though... At least that's just 3-4 hours,  not 12...

It goes a long way to understanding why the PC version is damn popular, Reliablilty and the ability to save your game for later.

[phoamslinger]

heh,

Titan is one of my favorite games to play.  played it last week and the game was over in about 60 minutes.

no, if you want a long game, try playing out the entire general war campaign for Task Force Games Federation and Empire.

loosely based on the Star Trek universe, it's a massive fleet battle game between empires with hundreds of ships each.  in a single player's turn there can be up to dozens of individual fleet engagements to resolve, each taking anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour to finally complete.  with bookkeeping and everything, a full turn (with everyone taking there move) can take a full day to finish.  and there are around 36 turns in the entire game.

ah, remembrances of college days when I could justify stuff like this...