Your Longest Game

Tell us about the longest game that you ever played? What game, how many players, and most importantly, what factors made this game last so long? Was it fun?

I posted this under the Classic Games category, because it seems like modern games are generally targeted at shorter attention spans.

Shellhead wrote:

Tell us about the longest game that you ever played? What game, how many players, and most importantly, what factors made this game last so long? Was it fun?

Barbarossa to Berlin, almost a year ago to the day. It was 13 hours, two player. It's a long game as there are lots of turns, each takes quite some time to get through. Plus it was very close. It was incredibly fun, and easily the best game of anything I have ever played. I have not played it again since, although we keep talking about getting it done again, this time split into 2 days instead of one insanely long session. The game was so tense, we were running on adrenalin by the end. Heh.

Not counting RPGs, I've had really only two worth mentioning.

1. weekly DAK campaign that went on for about 9 months. Lasted from beginning of fall semester to end of spring semester my sophomore year of college.

2. Empires in arms, bi-weekly lasted 2 months? We were playing on saturdays, so football season killed it. We will probably restart this at some point in the future.

If you are talking longest one time gaming session, I would probably say a game of 6 player titan, which sometimes went around 8 hours.

hancock.tom wrote:

Not counting RPGs, I've had really only two worth mentioning.

1. weekly DAK campaign that went on for about 9 months. Lasted from beginning of fall semester to end of spring semester my sophomore year of college.

2. Empires in arms, bi-weekly lasted 2 months? We were playing on saturdays, so football season killed it. We will probably restart this at some point in the future.

If you are talking longest one time gaming session, I would probably say a game of 6 player titan, which sometimes went around 8 hours.

I also had an abnormally long game of PoG once, but we split it into two days. Probably well over 10 hours. I think we had a rule or two wrong which played a part.

Full campaign POG with two inexperienced players could go that long, Tom.

I have a tie for longest game, Civilization and Strategic L5R.

The epic game of Civilization was roughly 11 hours long, though that included 30 minutes for setup and reviewing the rules, plus 30 minutes for a dinner break. I honestly don't know why it took so long, though I'm certain that it was my fault, because this one guy kept glaring at me after the dinner break. I had only played once before, maybe five years earlier, so everything was unfamiliar. Also, of the four of us playing, three of us had just been laid off from the same company the previous day, so I'm sure that we wasted time talking about that. It wasn't incredibly fun. I was distracted worrying about making ends meet soon. Plus that one guy was glaring at me for being the AP guy, and I hate AP guys, so knowing that I was being one sucked.

Strategic L5R, aka Legend of the Five Rings, was one of the greatest gaming experiences ever, despite mismanagement by the Alderac staff at GenCon in '01. There were 78 players, broken up into 13 teams (clans) of 6. Each team consisted of 1 Daimyo, 1 Karo and 4 Warlords. The Warlords each played a deck that represented and army of their clan, and their current location was marked on a big map of Rokugan. The Daimyos of all the clans were kept isolated in a separate area with the big map, and all they did was diplomacy amongst themselves (or trash-talk), plus issue movement and attack orders to the Warlords. The sixth member of each team was the Karo (General), who merely carried messages back and forth between the Daimyo and the Warlords of his clan.

Each clan had a secret victory condition, plus there were general victory points that could be won for taking and holding provinces, or possibly capturing the capital city of Otosan-Uchi. One really cool aspect was that every province in Rokugan was represented by an oversized CCG card that also imposed a condition or restriction on any battles that were waged at that location. Once a battle started, a CCG-style game would begin there, with so many rounds of the game played for each meta-turn of the overall game. These battles were often multi-player, with multiple clans joining the battle, and also sometimes multiple armies/Warlords of the same clan in the same battle.

The event was originally scheduled for 9:00 PM to 3:00 AM, starting on Friday evening. Unfortunately, this year was kind of the high-water mark for the regular L5R CCG, so Alderac was struggling to run huge tournaments each day of the convention. The Friday tournament ran way over time, so we couldn't even start until 11:30 PM, though we at least started organizing into teams at 8:30 PM, and then fine-tuning decks and discussing strategy for the next 2.5 hours.

I played the Daimyo of the Scorpion Clan, and quickly earned a reputation as The Honest Scorpion, playing against stereotype. (Scorpions are very much like the Lannisters of AGoT, in terms of both geography and reputation.) I made deals and kept every one, secretly positioning us for a surprise victory just before the end.

Due to the very late hour, the game started to suffer attrition in participants around 3:00 AM. By 5:00 AM, 2/3 of the players were gone, and the referees were exhausted and frazzled. That's when one of the judges mistakenly assumed that one of our guys was missing from a key location, and disqualified him, causing us to miss out on our special victory condition. Thirty minutes later, the event ended. I walked back to the hotel as the sun came up.

That sucked, but the overall experience was amazing. A year later, some of the players from that event still recognized me and called me The Honest Scorpion.

We played an Axis & Allies variant with two boards in separate rooms and fog of war, with a moderator, aerial scouting and shit like that. That took all damn day. I would chalk this up to not fun.

The longest game I own would be either Descent (campaign) or Twilight Imperium 3rdE.

On a related note, I have played a lot of games of Divine Right over the years, and we have never, ever finished a full 20-turn game, especially when I played with the game designer himself. Glenn Rahman suffers from an almost crippling case of Analysis Paralysis. But even back in the day, when my friends and I played an average of two games of Divine Right a month... we generally played for 5 or 6 hours, then one more turn around the table, then scored it right then. Almost every game was 4-6 players, but there are some fiddly details, and the scope of the game is epic... 13 kingdoms at war across a continent, plus barbarians, mercenaries, monsters, mages, and mystic artifacts.

Longest board game: PoG, 24 hours in two days of 12. Yes, we were learning the game. My tensest game ever!

Longest campaign: Empires in Arms, every Tuesday for four months

Longest Megagame: The Last War http://www.jimwallman.org.uk/tlw/index.htm , WWII from January 1942 - Summer 1945, 122 players and 28 umpires. 16 hours in two days. Fucking awesome.

My longest game was Starcraft with six players, about 1 year ago. It took 9 hours to play but it included teaching the other 5 players how to play, checking the rulebook to answer questions (as I had only played 2X before that and incorrectly I might add).

It was at TABSCon in Toronto.

It was fun but whenever I teach a game I lose badly, because I am relegated to becoming "Joe Rules Lookup" and "Joe FAQ." I have a had time focusing on the game at hand let alone correctly instructing new players around the mistakes I made.

thejinx13 wrote:

It was fun but whenever I teach a game I lose badly, because I am relegated to becoming "Joe Rules Lookup" and "Joe FAQ." I have a had time focusing on the game at hand let alone correctly instructing new players around the mistakes I made.

I have a similar problem, only it's when I'm playing a game that I designed. I am too busy analyzing what is or isn't working well, or how well players understand the game, and lose track of just playing the game. I always lose when playing my own games.

I have no really epic tales. But my longest ever game was a session of Titan, probably 5-6 years ago, that started around 7pm and finished at 4am. And it was a Monday night so we all had to go to work the next day.

It was long because there were five of us, we were all inexperienced and playing too defensively and after the first few hours we were all to drunk to remember what was in our own stacks, let alone anyone else's, and so had to waste loads of time checking them all before we moved.

I've played a game or two of TI:3 that have surpassed the 10 hour mark.

25 hours over a long weekend is my record. The game is Star Saga I, which isn't STRICTLY a board game. More of a computer moderated multi-player paragraph game.

We also did Star Saga 1 and 2 in sessions over a few months a 4 or 5 years back. We logged perhaps 40 hours.

And I'll be ready to play again in a few years. After I've forgotten enough.

As to traditional games, we did actually complete a game of City of Chaos in 11 hours. It woefully outlived its fun.

Both games are actually fairly close in structure. They are like giant, terrifying versions of Tales of the Arabian Nights, with a more focused plot consisting of fewer repeating elements.

Star Saga I and II include (collectively) 30 Tales-sized booklets. Some of the paragraphs go for a page or more. Combined with this is a diceless combat system where any of the attack and defense weapons have a mystery value for each combat. Obtaining the weapons becomes an obsession that involves complex Settlers style trading with the other players

Wha?! CITY OF CHAOS can be played to completion? Man, two hours into it I realized that it was NEVER going to end! It's too bad because it could be amazing.

Back in the day, 10-12 hour games of SUPREMACY (all or most expansions) weren't uncommon. We'd do day-long TALISMAN games with 8 or 9 players and all expansions. Some marathon DIPLOMACY sessions are filed away back there too.

The most outrageous playtime ever was my legendary six hour long game of DAS ZEPTER VON ZAVANDOR. It should have been 90 minutes tops.

I don't see how people are hitting such long playtimes with modern games like STARCRAFT or TI3...I understand if everybody's new and it's kind of a casual thing, but most new games have timing elements that sort of cap how long they can go. I've never played a game of TI3 that went over six hours and I don't see how it could- particularly if you play with the accelerated early turns.