# Longest Board Game You Ever Played



## dm4hire (Jul 2, 2010)

Waxing nostalgic I started thinking about when I gamed back in my navy days and the many off the wall things we did.  One of our escapades was tinkering with the rules for Axis & Allies, creating our own home rules and playing free for all games.  One of those free for all games found us playing in teams with each team controlling one of the countries and there were about 10 – 15 of us playing.  Thanks to our dedication in gaming and such a large number of people playing the game lasted almost a week non-stop as each member of a team took turns controlling our country.  No one could get the upper hand as alliances shifted between players striving to make sure no one team actually got the better of the rest.  So what’s the longest you’ve ever played a board game and why?


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## Dire Bare (Jul 2, 2010)

Talisman 2nd Edition with ALL of the supplements, including the little ones from White Dwarf magazine.  Just over a dozen people were playing, and everybody had a unique character as there were so many in the game.  It took an entire day!

I've had some long Axis & Allies games as well, but never with more of the standard five.

My attention span is much shorter these days and I prefer games with relatively quick resolutions.


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## Runestar (Jul 2, 2010)

And I thought my 6-hour session for Risk: Godstorm was long...


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## Jan van Leyden (Jul 2, 2010)

We broke off our 9-person Advanced Civilization after 14 hours due common weariness.

We have had several gaming weekends with 4 or 5 hours of sleep in three days, but for various games, not a single one.

Those days are over, now, but in September we'll make another attempt with 20 adults and some 20 children. Maybe I dust off Pax Britannica?


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## Achan hiArusa (Jul 2, 2010)

Civilization (not Sid Meier).  My ex-girlfriend loved the game, but a game could take 12 hours easy.  We would play and I would cook for everyone which irritated her because it took away from the game (she had Aspergers and didn't understand why everyone just didn't pack some easy to eat food knowing it was an all day game).


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## Thornir Alekeg (Jul 2, 2010)

In college we had a stock-trading game called Maxi-Bourse.  I don't recall exactly how many hours the game lasted, but we played all day Saturday, most of the day Sunday, and then came back to it in the evenings throughout the next week, until the next Saturday when we finally gave up because nobody could manage to win.  

In the end we came to the conclusion we had misinterpreted some of the rules, thereby making the game near impossible to win.


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## Vyvyan Basterd (Jul 2, 2010)

Games of Rail Baron routinely took three of us 12-16 hours to play.


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## Nebten (Jul 2, 2010)

Back in high school we had a 3 day session of Axis & Allies. It was 4 of us, maybe the full 5. That was over 10 years ago and I haven't had the urge to play that game again since.


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## Edgewood (Jul 2, 2010)

Last weekend, my friend and I started a new game of World in Flames. We decided to do a marathon weekend, playing both Saturday and Sunday. We started at the Sept/Oct 1939 turn and played both days for 12 hours each. We ended at the Jan/Feb turn of 1941. That's 24 hours of play and we managed 8 turns only. We still have the rest of the war to play!! If we were to play the whole game straight, we figure it would take nearly 200-250 hrs to play the whole thing.


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## mattcolville (Jul 2, 2010)

We started a game of Avalon Hill's DUNE at 8pm and didn't finish until around 4am. Maybe 5am.

Some of the players hadn't played before, but one of the nice things about the game is after about 3 rounds, you've got it all figured out and then everyone was on a level playing field.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 2, 2010)

One of my old groups had a Federation & Empire game that lasted a Summer...largely due to the fact that my innovative tactics threw a monkey wrench into the plans of other players, making them incredibly tentative in their actions.

The other thing that lengthened the process that we chose to play out some of the battles at the Star Fleet Battles level, for greater _feel._

Good times, good times.


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## Xeterog (Jul 2, 2010)

Advanced Civilization regularly lasts for 8-12 hours (haven't played in years tho)

Seen other spend all semester playing World-in-flames (not me personally).

Titan can go on forever for the last two players involved..

Diplomacy 6-10 hours

World of Warcraft, the board game, took us 14 hours the 1st time we played..got it down to about 6 now tho.

Federation and Empire always looked like it would be a looong game (many months, kinda like World in flames), but have never played it.

Don't see how anyone can play Stock A&A for more than about 4 hours--unless you are going for total victory/anililation.


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## Crothian (Jul 3, 2010)

Axis and Allies a couple of decades ago came out with expansions. They were just pieces and rules and not full board games like they have now. There was also a larger version of the world map that was vinyl. We used rules from many of the expansion that included WW1 pieces with the WW2 pieces. There was one expansion for WW1 that had optional rules of using other countries and had limits on infantry. We had a note book to keep track of units produced and used all the countries. It was a mess and took like three days (Memorial weekend as it were). We grilled out, had a couple cases of beer and soda. We had movies going as it could be an hour in between turns. There were five of us and it was ridiculously long and fun.


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## Diamond Cross (Jul 4, 2010)

The second time I play4ed Diplomacy with some of my friends, we stalemated so that it lasted thirty hours so because I was too tired I just said to heck with and let somebody take over one of my territories.

My friends will not play diplomacy with me anymore.


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## On Puget Sound (Jul 4, 2010)

My wife and I are both Advanced Civ fiends; we play it at every game convention we can and we can almost always finish it in the 7-8 hours allotted.  (Just discovered Through The Ages, which has a lot of the same feel in 4 hours.  Liking it so far!)

Way back in the 70s I was briefly part of an SPI War in Europe - I was only in it for a weekend, commanding British forces in North Africa, but I don't know that the game ever actually ended, or was intended to.

Have played several Titan games that were long enough to leave set up and come back to the next day.

I want to play the full game of SPI's Empires of the Middle Ages - I own it but haven't played it except solo.  

I also want to run a convention-length Rise and Fall, with players coming in throughout the weekend as new barbarian tribes, playing through their transitions to kingdom empire and eventual collapse, and being swallowed up by new players entering.


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## Holy Bovine (Jul 4, 2010)

Advanced Civilization by Avalon Hill holds the top rank for longest game I have ever played at just under 13 hours.  We started at 11am and finished just shy of midnight the same day.  8 players total iirc.  

I'm surprised someone could play Axis & Allies for more than 4-5 hours.  In my experience, even with new players, most game end by 3 hours tops.

We once tried to play a game of World of Warcraft (the boardgame of course) and were bored beyond words by the 6 hour mark.  

I have seen games of Runebound go for 6+ hours as well.  We discovered the secret to an actual enjoyable game of Runebound is to limit the number of players to 4 or less.


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## Chris Knapp (Jul 4, 2010)

Back in the early 80's we used to play marathon sessions of Avalon Hill's Squad Leader (the original, not ASL) with CoI, CoD, and AoV supplements. A single turn (out of a 10 turn scenario) would take usually 2 hours with all the phases, op attacks, line of sight arguments, or armor penetration vs facing issues, etc.


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## dm4hire (Jul 6, 2010)

Holy Bovine said:


> I'm surprised someone could play Axis & Allies for more than 4-5 hours.  In my experience, even with new players, most game end by 3 hours tops.




When I say home rules, I mean just that.  We actually calculated how much money you actually would have had to get the normal start setup and you got all of that minus one infantry, factory, and anti air gun.  You started only with your capitol.  We then built up from there and when you're playing free for all, each country in it for themselves, it gets pretty cut throat.  Most of the time we'd beat up on whoever was doing the best and alliances would change quickly.  Often second or third rate teams would ally with the bottom team to try and take out the current leader.  It was fun.  Also please remember that back then there wasn't a built in time thing as there is now (if you never played first ed, that is).


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## SethDrebitko (Jul 9, 2010)

I would have to say the longest game ever was twilight imperium.


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## Wycen (Jul 9, 2010)

SethDrebitko said:


> I would have to say the longest game ever was twilight imperium.




Ditto.


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## Philotomy Jurament (Jul 10, 2010)

Probably _The Longest Day_ (Avalon Hill).  We played a game that took all summer, played off and on.  It rendered the dining room table at my friend's house unusable, to his mom's consternation (I don't think they used the dining room much, anyway, though).  Fortunately, his father was a player in (and the owner of) the game, so that wasn't a big problem.  

[Note that Board Game Geek lists the playing time as 5,400 minutes, or 90 hours.  I think our game probably took longer than that, but I don't know for certain.]


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## Mythtify (Jul 12, 2010)

A 6 player game of Titan.


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## MerricB (Jul 13, 2010)

The longest I can remember was this game of World of Warcraft: the Boardgame which went for six hours. Short by old standards, but pretty long for me.

Cheers!


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## AJCarrington (Jul 17, 2010)

Longest game I ever played wasThe Third World War by GDW.  The core game on its own was good for 4-6 hours of play, but when you tacked on all the other modules, particularly Persian Guild: Battle for the Middle East which had a complete "political" sub-game, it took forever.  Last memory was the game dieing in Turn 1 after ~10 hours of set-up and play...

AJC


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## Verdande (Jul 18, 2010)

Short by some of your standards, we played a game of Descent: Journeys into the Dark that outlasted its fun. I was the Overlord, and they were absolutely impossible to kill. I could only slow them down, and eventually I just let them get to the final boss and kill him so we could stop playing the damn game.

It was only four or so hours, but after the two hour mark, I was tired of the whole damn thing. It's a great game, but it's no fun when one side or the other is going to win easily.


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## Kobold Boots (Jul 18, 2010)

Twilight Imperium 3rd ed.


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## Holy Bovine (Jul 20, 2010)

Kobold Boots said:


> Twilight Imperium 3rd ed.




How did that one go?  I actually own the thing but have never played.  Did it hold up as entertaining for the entire length?  What was the playtime in total?


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## Holy Bovine (Jul 20, 2010)

Verdande said:


> Short by some of your standards, we played a game of Descent: Journeys into the Dark that outlasted its fun. I was the Overlord, and they were absolutely impossible to kill. I could only slow them down, and eventually I just let them get to the final boss and kill him so we could stop playing the damn game.
> 
> It was only four or so hours, but after the two hour mark, I was tired of the whole damn thing. It's a great game, but it's no fun when one side or the other is going to win easily.




I'll only play Descent now with the Road to Legend expansion.  Shorter dungeons, full campaign rules and an inability for either side to totally dominate like you are describing (and I have seen several times in the past).  Oh I suppose it's _technically_ possible for one side or the other to get such an insurmountable lead in the early going as to be unbeatable but in the 3 full campaigns I have played in or ran it never happened (we did get to gold level in all three - 2 wins for the Overlord, 1 for the Heroes).


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## Agamon (Aug 9, 2010)

My 8 hour session of Twilight Imperium was recently beat out by a 9+ hour session of 1856.  Fun game, I enjoy the 18xx series, but yeah, they be long games.


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## Pickles JG (Aug 10, 2010)

I played about 45 turns of Europa Universalis at 2 hours a turns. We played 3-5 turns once a month for a year or so.  It's 60 turns long but I burned out. The other 5 plus a replacement played another game that went 54 turns but they could never get 
together for the final session. 

I used to play Totaller Krieg quite a bit which is 24 hours for 3 players.

Nowadays I get impatient at about 4 hours if not sooner.


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## Liquidsabre (Aug 10, 2010)

Oh yes, it has to be Twilight Imperium 3e + Shattered Empires expansion. An 8 player game @ 12 hours with a collective food break. Good times!!


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## DragonLancer (Aug 14, 2010)

SethDrebitko said:


> I would have to say the longest game ever was twilight imperium.




Same here. Over 12 hours to get one game done. Never played it again.


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## Punnuendo (Aug 14, 2010)

Twilight Imperium here as well. Ten hour game. However, it did remain fun the entire time.


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## Merkuri (Aug 14, 2010)

Back in high school my church youth group had a really silly fundraiser called a "rockathon".  It was like a walkathon except instead of people pledging money per mile you walk they pledge money for number of hours you're willing to spend in a rocking chair.  (We were allowed a 5-minute break every hour for things like using the facilities.)  The one year I did it we "rocked" for 24 hours straight.

We started really early in the morning (like, 6AM, I think) and early on five of us started a game of Risk before the sun came up.  Two people got bored with it and dropped out within the first hour (their territories became neutral) and I think we wiped the third person within the second hour, then me and the other remaining player continued to play until after the sun went down.  The entire game was somewhere between 10-12 hours long.  

We were both fans of what we called the "slug maneuver" where you mass up a whole lot of armies on one territory and use that mass to blast through your enemy's territory, leaving a single army behind on each territory in your wake (the slime trail), but we never seemed to be able to build up enough mass to completely take out the other person, and from the handful of territories left unconquered the opponent would turn in all of their risk cards to build up a similar "slug" and would blast you back.  It was kinda like a slowmo ping-pong ball tournament. 

The other really long game we had was Settlers of Catan.  I'd often bring this came to Cape weekends (when a bunch of us got together in a cabin on Cape Cod for a weekend) but because there were only four players usually somebody had to team up or get left out, so I purchased the expansion that lets six people play.  We started soon after we had brunch and before we knew it it was dark and we were all hungry for dinner, then I think we got back from dinner and played some more.  That was at least an 8 hour game, but could've been closer to 10 hours.  I was actually surprised everybody in our group was willing to sit still for that long!

We all like Settlers, but I'm not sure everyone'd be willing to spend an entire day playing it again.  I wish the game could be shorter but still allow six people.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Aug 15, 2010)

Would Battletech count as a board game?

Because back in high school we went crazy and devised a battalion on battalion battle. Lead figures for every single piece. A table tennis table covered in every single hex map we could find.

Started in spring, 6-10 hours each Saturday and Sunday, lasted until the next school year started in September.

We never did anything that dumb again, never fighting a battle larger than a couple lances at a time.


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## MerricB (Aug 15, 2010)

Eric Anondson said:


> Would Battletech count as a board game?
> 
> Because back in high school we went crazy and devised a battalion on battalion battle. Lead figures for every single piece. A table tennis table covered in every single hex map we could find.
> 
> ...




Yes, it certainly counts as a boardgame. 

Cheers!


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## mandarific (Aug 16, 2010)

Risk for me, I think we went for six hours? I get really antsy if I have to sit in one place for too long, though I've had some monster D&D sessions that went way longer than that.


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## dvvega (Aug 18, 2010)

World of Warcraft Boardgame: 6 hours

Arkham Horror (base set only): 2 players, 8-10 hours (it is fuzzy - I had a migraine). A 2 player game when one of you is geared up to kill monsters, the other is geared to shut down gates and the monster slayer has the "Paddy Wagon". It just kept going back and forth - I'd kill the monsters to clear the way for my wife to go for gates and keep out horror level down then we'd draw a new gate appearance. Was just endless!!

D


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## Magesmiley (Aug 22, 2010)

Over the years, I've done a number of long games (the longest being back in high school when I had a lot more time). Some of the more memorably long:

(all of these are with all of the expansions)
Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition: 10 hours
Twilight imperium 2nd Edition: 12 hours
Talisman 2nd Edition: I had one which ran 14 hours, with Pandora's Box at the end and no one able to kill anyone using it. The end game took forever.
Axis & Allies: Longest here was at a game convention, we played for 12 hours the first day (with Japan and Russia taken out at the end of that day), then the three surviving players returned for the second and played another 6 before finally ending with a German victory.

But by far the longest I've game I've played was Supremacy. My siblings and a couple of my friends played a game one Summer during high school that ran on and off (playing 3-6 hours a session) over the course of a month. It probably cleared 40 hours in total. I was fortunate that we had a basement that I could leave the game set up that long.


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## Hejdun (Aug 30, 2010)

I came in here to comment that old school Avalon Hill games are easily the longest games you'll ever play, and saw indeed lots of those answers.

My personal longest is probably Avalon Hill's _Caesar (Battle of Alesia)_.  One really long game lasted about 25 hours spread over a week or so.  It has hundreds of finicky cardboard squares that can each conceivably move during each of the 20 turns.

Hugely interesting tactical situation as Rome though.  Besieged and besieging at the same time.  Lots of feints and misdirection and gut calls make it a very fun game.  Now that I think about it, it'd probably be better to play on Maptool to avoid the whole cardboard piece insanity...


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## Kobold Boots (Aug 30, 2010)

Holy Bovine said:


> How did that one go? I actually own the thing but have never played. Did it hold up as entertaining for the entire length? What was the playtime in total?




First, sorry for missing this question for about a month.  

The thing with TI3 is that the length of game completely depends on the players at the table and how much your group of people tends towards masochism (complexity) when you get together to play.

If you use the basic game, and keep the imperial card as is, regardless of the other rules you use, you're looking at a 4-5 hour game with 5 players that know what they're doing with the game and move in reasonable amounts of time.

If you've got new people at the table, add a half hour per new person to that time allotment.  If you swap out the Imperial card with the one in the Shattered Empire expansion add two hours to that time frame.  

The following will cause you the loss of a weekend to TI3.
1. Swap out the Imperial card.
2. Use all optional rules
3. Don't put your most anal retentive person in charge of the victory track and objective cards.

Of the three, the third one has proven in my experience to be the most important.  If you have someone who knows what they are doing, watching the victory track, reminding players how to win the game regularly and actively advising of the victory point conditions during other players' turns, the game will go a lot faster.

I've had games go 4 hours, and I've had others go from 1pm to 11pm finishing only when a player folds due to getting ganged up on.


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## EdPovi (Sep 1, 2010)

Longest game would be a 6 player game of Titan (AH version), I don't recall how long it actually went as I wasn't among the final 2.  It was over 12 hrs.  This game did get multiple plays, but it wasn't always this long.

Have also had long games of AA:50 and Advanced Civ. Most of my TI3 games were under 5 hrs, but everyone knew how to play.


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## Plane Sailing (Sep 30, 2010)

Longest total game: SPI War in the Galaxy, took two entire days across a weekend.

Most unexpectedly long game: Warpwar - a microgame which is supposed to last for 30 minutes but a pal and I were so evenly matched we continued for 6hrs then called it a draw.

Recent longest game: Settlers of America (new Catan game). Started playing with my two daughters and we did 5 straight hours on Saturday afternoon and then an additional 2 hours on Sunday afternoon to finish the game off. My 6 year old held me to a draw via low cunning and strategy. I was so proud!


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## Korgoth (Oct 1, 2010)

Avalon Hill's _Civilization_. Best boardgame ever.


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## CarlZog (Oct 6, 2010)

On Puget Sound said:


> Way back in the 70s I was briefly part of an SPI War in Europe - I was only in it for a weekend, commanding British forces in North Africa, but I don't know that the game ever actually ended, or was intended to.
> 
> 
> I want to play the full game of SPI's Empires of the Middle Ages - I own it but haven't played it except solo.
> ...




You need to go to the ConsimWorld Expo's Monster Game Con. It's a convention of board wargame junkies, and one of the features is playing these massive old SPI games.

Terrible Swift Sword is the longest I've ever played.

Carl


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