‘We’re looking at a 30-year run’: UK pair aim to complete world’s most complex board game

Decades from now, friends may become first people known to have finished The Campaign for North Africa

“We have had a six-turn practice run. It took about 18 months,” said Andy Taeger, with what seemed like a chuckle as he contemplated playing the world’s most complicated board game.

“Based on that, we are looking at a 20- to 30-year run for the full game,” said his gaming partner James Purcell. “We’ve come to terms with it.”

The Guardian joined the pair in a Newcastle front room on Friday as they prepared to start an insane odyssey, playing the legendarily knotty war game The Campaign for North Africa.

If they finish it – and that, subject to the events of the next two to three decades, is the intention – they will become the first people known to have completed a game so vast, detailed and time-consuming that it has achieved mythical status in board gaming communities. It is a holy grail.

Purcell, 29, is a mental health worker from Wallsend, Taeger, 30, a software developer from Gosforth. They’re happy to be called geeks. They met about 10 years ago and realised straight away that they had a connection.

“We were at a house party with a mutual friend and I was singing James Blunt’s Wisemen in one of the bedrooms, quite drunk,” said Purcell. “Andy happened to pass by the bedroom door, heard me singing and decided to join in. So we became fast friends from there.”

Their shared love of Dungeons & Dragons and phases playing Yu-Gi-Oh!, a trading card game, and Carcassonne, a board game, have kept the friendship going. When another friend mentioned The Campaign For North Africa, a 1979 game designed by Richard Berg simulating the desert war of 1940-43, they set out to discover more.

They watched a few videos, read up about it and went to the pub. “We both realised that we’d been thinking about the game for two weeks. By the end of the night, we were committed to giving it a try,” said Purcell.

Along with buying the game – £970 from eBay – they decided to chronicle their journey on a weekly podcast, War With a Mate. “We knew there was no reason to keep playing unless we’re held accountable,” said Purcell. “Otherwise we knew we’d buy the game, we’d give up inside two weeks and we’d have a thousand-pound board game that we can do nothing with.

“With a podcast, people can follow along and if we back out we’ve got the shame of everyone calling us out on it.”

The pair have spent 99 podcast episodes chronicling their prep and practice for the game before starting it at 7.30pm on Friday for episode 100. It could take 20 years, but “originally it was looking like 50,” said Purcell, not wanting to contemplate the idea of still playing as they approached 80.

On Friday afternoon, they were setting up in a friend’s house because they will livestream day one. It will normally be played at Taeger’s flat.

The game comes with a 10ft map, which they have divided up into five picture frames and 1,600 pieces, which they will magnetise. “We haven’t punched the German pieces out yet because we won’t need them for about five years,” said Purcell.

They will have to keep track of aircraft, truck convoys, land units, supply dumps, water use, fuel evaporation and so, so much more, including not to do anything that could be deemed a war crime.

It comes with a history book as well as seven rule books with a dizzying list. One of the best known is the “pasta rule” about Italian forces needing more water in order to boil their pasta rations. It’s assumed to be a joke – but who knows?

Berg does seem to be “poking fun” at the players, said Purcell. At the same time, he clearly also has a thorough knowledge of the campaign. “The amount of research behind this must have been insane,” said Taeger.

Purcell is playing as the Axis forces and Taeger as the Commonwealth. It remains to be seen if the game will be so historically accurate that Purcell is destined to lose. He doesn’t think so.

“I think we’ve seen already, through the practice run, you can very much change the fate of the campaign through better decision-making,” he said.

Both think the game could very well end up a draw, which would be gutting. “I think, honestly, a loss might even be better than a draw because at least it’s a definitive result,” said Taeger. There is also the chance they’ll find that the game is simply not finishable, but thanks to the podcast, they will have plenty of people cheering them on.

“The reaction has been surprisingly positive,” said Purcell, with many boardgamers thankful that someone is doing it so they don’t have to. “We’ve not really had many people decry it as the stupid thing that it is, which would be the natural reaction.”

The players are determined, but they also intend to take it seriously – and tread very carefully.

“You don’t want to make a mistake because you were in a bit of a rush,” said Taeger, definitely laughing now. “You might have to be dealing with it for the next 10 years.”