When the wargame runs 1,500 hours, the podcast is the game

The schedule on their website ends with a straight face: "Full Campaign for North Africa = Ep 100 - Heat death of the universe." Andy and James, two friends in England who record together as War With a Mate, have spent nearly a hundred weekly episodes on the practice (!) scenario of The Campaign for North Africa, six turns out of 111, and are now about to start the game proper. The New York Times profiled the attempt in September, reasonably framing it as a question: can two friends complete a game no one has ever finished?

The game is SPI's late-1970s monster, designed by Richard Berg: the North African campaign of 1940 to 1943 at a granularity that approaches parody. A ten-foot map. 1,600 counters. Five rulebooks, including the famous clause granting Italian battalions an extra water point for cooking pasta. An estimated 1,500 hours with the recommended ten players, "or two idiots if you're running short," as their site puts it. No completion of the full game has ever been documented. "We still don't understand what the camels do," they told Wargamer back in August, 20 months in.

It's pretty clear that Campaign has transcended games and is now is pure performance. A game that can't be played or even explained to each other is something out of Bolero or Calvino and the attempt is the game.

Or perhaps, what Andy and James are actually building is not progress toward a victory condition. It is a container for a friendship, with magnetized counters, a searchable rules PDF, spreadsheets to do the supply math, and a weekly show they describe as an accountability tool. The estimate in circulation is 20 years. The point of a 20-year game, as any durational artist could tell them, is the 20 years.

In April we asked why board games don't get better furniture. Here is the limit case: a game that needs not a table but a spare room, and a plan for the rest of your life. The real campaign begins at episode 100, which they intend to premiere live.