Longest Board Game You've Played

[Orius]

Probably either Monopoly or Risk. And honestly, I don't really like either of those games much, I think they're somewhat poorly designed and can take to long to resolve if the game hits a bad status quo.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

Besides the Diplomacy games that take a week between turns, the longest I played any one single board game was still Diplomacy.

7 players, 10 hours. Ended in draw between Russia/England/Turkey. No one could make the 18 required to win at that point.

 

[Cor_Malek]

Talisman, by a longshot. I think it went on for like 4 days, totalling to something between 10-12 hours, then we needed the table for work, so we called it a day. I don't think more than 3 players went past the middle ring either.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

If you include hex based wargames then The Longest Day lived up to its name - with four players the game lasted about eight months! (According to Board Game Geek the median time for a game was around 5400 minutes. )

The Auld Grump

 

[Bluenose]

In High School.

the Out-of-print GDW's Drang Nach Osten/Untentschieden?

A WWII Regt./Brigade/Division level boardgame of the war in Europe along the entire eastern front, from Norway and Finland all the way down to the Caspian Sea.


Turns were measured in days, with 8-10 hours at the table, and games were measured in weeks or months. After playing awhile we could usually determine the outcome of a game after two weeks of play.

The Europa series still rocks. I still see a game played at Origins ever year.

The next longest boardgame was Streets of Stalingrad, produced by Dana Lombardy, and also currently out-of-print although you might be able to score a copy from Last Stand Games. We could get two or three turns in a day with this platoon level recreation of the entire battle of Stalingard.

Didn't SPI (Not TSR :-() produce their own competing monster games, War in the East and War in the West? Those would probably have taken as long. Although the games are OoP, there's a publisherintending to put out the whole Europa series - HMS Series Page

My own 'longest ever' was also a World War Two wargame. I can't for the life of me remember the name, but it was a Western Desert game covering the fighting around Tobruk. That doesn't sound like it should be particularly long, but the level of detail was incredible - units kept track of how much supply they had on hand, how many vehicles they had, iirc what type of weapons they had. So while the scale wasn't gigantic, the book-keeping and complexity of combat made it really slow to play. It would I think have been a fascinating game now for a computer recreation, since a PC could have kept track of the details far more effectively. I know we never finished it, despite playing on-and-off all through the summer holidays.

My longest completed game would have been Flat Top, probably the Coral Sea scenario. Hourly turns and mostly hidden movement made that take a long time. We spent weeks playing that, although we did finish it (the Japanese won).

 

[nedjer]

Longest preparation, shortest game. Spend endless hours setting out a game of Global War with two 'expert players' who didn't have time to help with the set up.

We sit down and after two moves they declare that their plan to capture the UK in the first two turns has gone wrong and the rest of the game is pointless, because they've no chance of winning: "the game isn't balanced." (Pity no one thought to tell Hitler that).

So the pair walk out, leaving the rest of us to tidy all the counters away. These two epic geniuses/ egos went on to train at Sandhurst, which may, in part, explain why the UK has become so incredibly bad at fighting wars.

 

[GameDaddy]

If you include hex based wargames then The Longest Day lived up to its name - with four players the game lasted about eight months! (According to Board Game Geek the median time for a game was around 5400 minutes. )

I had some gaming friends that liked this game. Never got into it myself though. The maps were awesome!

 

[GameDaddy]

Didn't SPI (Not TSR :-() produce their own competing monster games, War in the East and War in the West? Those would probably have taken as long.

SPI's Monster games

Highway to the Reich (WWII Operation Market Garden)
Wacht Am Rhein (WWII Battle of the Bulge)
Atlantic Wall (WWII - Operation Overlord)
Pacific War (WWII East)
Wellington's Victory (Napoleonics-Waterloo)
Bloody April - (Battle of Shiloh)


The Desert Game you are referring to is perhaps Desert Fox? I seem to remember some other folks in 1982 unhappy with the way the supply and logistics ran with that.

SPI also made a modern warfare monster game The Next War. I actually liked this monster game quite a bit. It was a hypothetical Russia invades the west game set during the cold war era of the late 70's. We played a a couple times, and often setup mini-scenarios of our own devising.

 

[Xeterog]

Probably either Monopoly or Risk. And honestly, I don't really like either of those games much, I think they're somewhat poorly designed and can take to long to resolve if the game hits a bad status quo.

once played 3 games of Monopoly in 3 hours..boy was that some cut-throat Monopoly play!

 

[UngainlyTitan]

In High School.

the Out-of-print GDW's Drang Nach Osten/Untentschieden?

A WWII Regt./Brigade/Division level boardgame of the war in Europe along the entire eastern front, from Norway and Finland all the way down to the Caspian Sea.


Turns were measured in days, with 8-10 hours at the table, and games were measured in weeks or months. After playing awhile we could usually determine the outcome of a game after two weeks of play.

The Europa series still rocks. I still see a game played at Origins ever year.

The next longest boardgame was Streets of Stalingrad, produced by Dana Lombardy, and also currently out-of-print although you might be able to score a copy from Last Stand Games. We could get two or three turns in a day with this platoon level recreation of the entire battle of Stalingard.

Played it under the name "Fire in the East" which is a later reprint (ASFIK) took two of us five months and we played in real time. In that, we took two weeks to play the two week turns.

Next longest Empires in Arms with World in Flames next in line.

I'm looking forward to cheap touch tables so I play them again using vassal or something like that to manage the game. Save a setup and state and play when we can.