Long Live Long Games

Last night I arranged with some friends to play Fury of Dracula, which I hadn't played in nearly a year. We spent about 2.5-3 hours on it, which is about average. As Dracula I started in Athens (because what moron Dracula starts in Athens?) and then dropped a new vampire in Valona. Some newspaper reports showed that I had started in Athens, so they were bearing down hard on me in Eastern Europe. Thankfully they were too busy trying to pin me down to find the vampire in Valona, and she matured and gave me two points that way after one day had already gone.

I managed to give them the slip until I made it to Venice the next day. There I intended to set sail, but Mina Harker found me. She had to fight through a minion armed with a pistol and knife, however, and she lost 6 points of health before she finally killed him. Then I played Relentless Minions and she had to fight him again, this time getting defeated and being forced to go to St. Mary and St. Joseph's. Just like that I was up to five vampire points. All I had to do was make it through this day and I would win.

Of course I had to go to sea to escape at this point, which delays the day from advancing. I made landfall in Cagliari, thinking that it seemed like a stupid enough move that they would assume I wouldn't do it. Turns out I outsmarted myself. Not only that, but they played long day about three times to keep the day from advancing. Lord Godalming found me first, but I was able to escape before taking any damage. Then Van Helsing made it out there, and I took a little damage before finally getting away again. Of course I had to take to the seas again.

By this time I'm down to just five or six blood, but I didn't have much choice. I made my way all the way up to Hamburg, since the Hunters were amassing in Western Europe and the British Isles. I used Wolf Form (it was night by now) to get down to Prague. Lord Godalming was able to take the rails to Prague, and then took another train two spots to Budapest. But I hadn't gone that way. I had gone through Vienna and down to Zagreb. They might have caught me if they had stopped in Vienna instead of taking the train. I ended up winning when a new day dawned, down to just three blood.

Long games are awesome. A lot of us here have been hitting shorter Euros pretty hard, but there really is no match for good 3-4 hours spent around a single game with good friends, where the narrative and atmosphere has time to stretch out and unfold. This might have been the best game of Fury of Dracula I've ever played, and I've played a lot of good ones.

It's easy to own too many long games, because there are only so many hours in my life to play them. But they will always have their place, especially when they're as good as Fury of Dracula.

I vastly prefer longer games. I'd rather play one go of Game of Thrones or Fury of Dracula then several plays of Survive! or love letter or what have you.

The problem with long games, such as Fury of Dracula, is they only get played once in a great while, so they require rereading the rules and explaining them all to a new group. So if I do the prep work of relearning the game before a session and then inevitably half the people cancel and I end sitting across the table from the one guy who I only invited to fill the 5th spot.

And (especially with 2 player games) I wonder if its worth the effort to teach a complicated game to someone who I may never play it with me again. This has been the case with Earth Reborn, teaching and learning it has felt like entering into a committed relationship with some other nerd.

with very little free time, it seems my game group tend towards easier and quicker to explain games.

But you have inspired me to break out Fury of Dracula again.

I wish I could play more long games. I have a bunch of 'em and they're some of my favorites. Edulis, aren't you nearish the Twin Cities? Come on down, we'll play a long game or two and make a day out of it.

Every time I set up an unorganized gaming day I get a handful of people. If I set up a gaming day to play anything over 2 hours I get crickets.

One day I will convince a full group to play GW and FFG Warrior Knights back-to-back with me. Some day I will play Blood Royale.

Here's the deal with long games.

- I love a great 3-4 hour game. Beyond that, I'm ready to do something else unless the game is is absolutely best in class. And it has to be something with 3-4 hours of gameplay, not two hours of gameplay and an hour of setup, administration and put- up.

- I have zero interest in anything that takes all day to play right now. I can have fun and enjoy hobby gaming without spending an entire day away from my family and other interests. Advanced Civ is probably the only game at this length I will ever play again.

- I have several long games in my collection. I would rather play any of those rather than bring a new one in and reduce the likelihood of favorites being played.

- It's a waste of time to play an obsolete game like Diplomacy when you can get all that it offers in Intrige...in a tenth of the time.

I feel like game length and what you enjoy most is very lifestyle dependent. If I was in highschool again (or University) all I'd want to play is long games, group dynamics in long games cannot be imitated in shorter games no matter how well they are designed. The basic mechanical exercises can be sped up and smoothed over but the way a group relates to itself changes over time and nothing but time can do that. Something to do with the nature of human interaction.

Put people in a room for one hour and ask them questions about one another. Do that again but leave them there for six hours and the results will be different. It's just how we are. If you are interested in playing people instead of mechanics than long games offers something no short game can. If you just like the mechanics and whatnot then you lose nothing.

I'm guessing that when I'm older and my son grows into a surely teenager I'll come back to them, at least that's what Sag tells us and I trust him on that front. Right now, raising a family, playing in a band, going to work, teaching on week-ends... there is no room for long games in my life at the moment. Maybe once or twice a year but... not this year. Not so far. I'm just not interested in making the effort right now.

So I think there is time and room for both but of course the money, the big money, is in making little games because everyone can find time for one more of those in their life. But long games have a hard time gaining ground in the market because you only want a couple on your shelf at any given moment. I have enough, perhaps too many, and won't buy anymore for quite some time. It's a shame that the market can't support more long games because I think there are design idea's that cannot be explored in these shorter games, design idea's that take into account how group dynamics change over time.

I enjoy long games, but nothing more than 4 hours. It's tough to get them to the table though. I only play 1 or 2 times a month lately, but I really hope to increase that this summer.

I like long games, but rarely get to play them. Not for the obvious reason of not having the time (which is equally true), but because of my game group. Almost every game takes nearly twice as long as the time listed on the box. This is bad enough with any game, but a killer with long games. If I could figure out a way to schedule games without one or two people, I would in a heartbeat. Obviously, I need to find new gamer friends.

I have 50/50 long games/short games here. I love some long games, like Conquest of Nerath and Conquest of the Empire, or Supremacy, but they have to be really fucking fun to get my ADHD ass in a chair for that long. Most of the time I'd rather play a game of Stone Age + Ascending Empires + Rampage in the same amount of time for the variety of it.

Also, I suck at games mostly, so I like 3 chances to play well rather than one long string of failure.

Great post Jon Jacob. You said everything on my mind.

I don't play them often, but my favorite games are almost all longer than 4 hours. And I'm ok with having a bunch of games on my shelf that don't get played often, because when they do they're often unforgettable. Others don't feel the same, I know there is a desire for a lean and mean shelf. But at this point in my life I can afford a shelf that isn't that lean and mean and can have games I don't play more than once a year. Or less.

And if you told me I had to stop playing and owning games that were 3-4 hours as "long," I would quit the hobby entirely. So 100 thumbs up to San's original post.

Everybody likes to rhapsodize about these epic, day-long Best Game Session of All Time situations that SOMETIMES long games can generate...but nobody does so for all of the other times when a five or six hour game dragged on to a ten hour game, or when everybody lost interest and quit halfway through, or when the game just kind of sucked (for one or more players...If I play a 90 minute game that sucks, not really a big deal. But if I come to your all-day game event and wind up not having fun with the one game that's scheduled for the entire day...that's a bust, apart from any non-game fun that might be had.

Face it. Long games are more often than not a drag. They're a pain in the ass to organize. They're a pain in the ass to set aside a day to get through. And odds are, you're not going to be playing these kinds of games frequently enough to get the most out of them in this day and age, regardless of lifestyle or life stage.

Yeah, there are those one-off sessions you remember for the rest of your life. But for every one of those I've had, speaking for myself...there are three or four that weren't these incredible, mindblowingly immersive and engaging games that changed the course of the hobby. But I have played a couple of games of Intrigue that STILL come up every time we get together to play. It didn't require all day to get to the stories and legends that came out of it.

I played in an insane 12 player Talisman (2nd edition) game with everything that went from about 2pm to 4am the next morning. It was amazing. But then there's also the last time I played Diplomacy, where I got so bored (and was functionally eliminated) that I just played Rock Band SOLO rather than sit and act like I gave a shit about what was going on in the game...just two hours into what wound up being a ten hour game.

There's always been this reaction in the AT mindset that "longer is better", and I've thought that myself in the past, but that's a load of shit. FUNNER is better. I would rather have more fun with a couple of games in a five hour period than to act all weirdly macho/superior/more invested because I played a single title where I had less fun.

It's a myth that longer games are more immersive. What happens isn't immersion, it's that some people commit differently and engage themselves differently because there is a time investment involved. I used to think that a Civilization game HAD to be long in order to capture the feel. I was completely wrong about that. There is no reason for a Civ game to be long, because if the design abstracts time, scope and scale appropriately then the actual playtime doesn't matter, and could actually detract from the game if it outstrips the player's level of engagement.

As for the whole lifestyle issue...I'm an adult and even though I don't have lazy sundays to do whatever the hell I want all day or anything like that, I can damn well schedule myself that time if I really want to. I have just as much freedom now as when I was 17, I just need to know in advance. Don't call me Friday night to come over Saturday morning, that doesn't work anymore. But this whole idea that adults/people with families or jobs, whatever, somehow "can't" play these kinds of games anymore is bullshit.

If you really want an epic-length, 12 hour long game where all of the narrative, drama and story unfolds or whatever...play something like Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis.

For the record, I don't really consider anything under three hours to be "long". "Long" to me is three hours and up.

Of course, my Hellfire Club gang tends to add at least an hour to just about everything we play just from bullshitting, fixing cocktails, impromptu crossbow demonstrations, discussion about occult topics and whatnot.

Agree, for me long is anything over 4 hours.

Shorter games are often forgettable. Sometimes that's become a shorter game just doesn't have the time or even depth to generate much of a narrative. If you can't remember the games you have played even a little while later, then you are just passing time in a specific manner.

Longer games do tend to generate more of a narrative, and people become more vested in their outcomes. And those long games are more likely to generate memorable moments that players will remember long after the game is finished.

It's funny how much of the Barnes post on the end of page one I actually agree with, yet I don't as well in other ways.

I agree, funner is better, no doubt. But that's a pretty subjective statement. Funner will vary wildly from one person to another. I don't know what's funner really, that is very situation dependent. My wife thinks funner is not playing any board games at all. Clearclaw might not even know what fun means.

I'm also not arguing that time equals immersion (although it may, it just wasn't my point) my point has much more to do with how we change over time. How we interact differently over time. I don't think there is anything "manly" about long games (and I despise the idea of wanting to be "manly" anyway, I think this whole macho thing is a bad idea that creates bad, violent men... but that's a different topic all together).

I'm interested in this concept of change over time. I also like the idea of setting up one game and being done with it, I don't need four different games, four different rule sets, four different set ups and take downs... to have fun. But I can roll that way to.

The one thing I do disagree with though is the time I have available based on my personal lifestyle. It could very well be that Barnes or other people on this site have time for long games in their life right now... but I'm not among their numbers. My life is just too damn busy right now, I actually have to not make new friends sometimes and it hurts me. I meet people at work and shows that want to hang out and I'd love to get to know them better but I just don't have the time. I'd like to make the time but my family takes priority over everything else and I don't (nor should) feel guilty about that. Sometime I can tell that they think I'm being arrogant or closed off, but that is not my intention. Time with my son trumps all else at this point. In this city I have very little family, one brother, that's it and no babysitter that we trust. So it's hard to find the time as much as I might like to but if it means robbing that time from my family... it's not going to happen. Also my main hobby continues to be music and that I will not cut.

I'm working eight days a week man, I just don't know how you guys do it.

Wow. Clearclaw. That's a name I've not heard in a while.