There is something quietly mesmerizing about human obsession, particularly the kind that asks a person to sit across a table for forty years to finish a single game. In living rooms and hobby dens, two men, Andy Taeger and James Purcell, have set themselves before Richard Berg’s legendary 1979 wargame, The Campaign for North Africa. The game is infamous not for its elegance, but for its staggering, bureaucratic pedantry. It requires up to ten players, covers ten feet of table space, and demands roughly 1,500 hours of gameplay—which, in the rhythm of ordinary lives stolen between jobs and family dinners, stretches naturally into decades. It tracks fuel evaporation under the midday sun, the exact tonnage of ammunition hauled across gravel plains, and, in its most notorious flourish, an extra ration of water for Italian troops so they can boil pasta.
It is easy to smile at the eccentricity of it all. As someone who spends his life reading trade ledgers and bureaucratic communiqués, I recognize the peculiar seduction of systems so detailed they feel like miniature universes. But as I read about these men carefully plotting supply lines from Alexandria to Tripoli, rolling dice to determine whether a truck convoy breaks an axle in the Qattara Depression, I found myself thinking not about the rulebook, but about the map itself. On the game board, as in the European history books that birthed it, North Africa is presented as a magnificent tabula rasa: an uninhabited expanse of sand, wind, and logistics, custom-built for European men in khaki shorts to test their tactical genius against one another.
That emptiness is a colonial fiction. The desert was never empty, and the war waged across it was never an abstract duel between Erwin Rommel and Bernard Montgomery. Long before the British Eighth Army and the German Afrika Korps transformed the sands into an imperial chessboard, the people of Libya had already survived decades of brutal Italian colonial pacification. Under Rodolfo Graziani, nearly half the population of Cyrenaica was forced into concentration camps behind barbed wire; hundreds of thousands of Bedouin were stripped of their livestock, their olive groves, and their lives. The desert that the tabletop gamer treats as a blank canvas of movement points was already soaked in the blood of resistance fighters who followed Omar Mukhtar.
When the Second World War spilled into the region, the local inhabitants were reduced to stage hands in someone else’s drama. Libyan and Egyptian laborers were conscripted to dig the trenches and carry the ammunition crates that the game abstracts into neat numerical counters. Bedouin trackers, whose intimate knowledge of shifting dunes kept foreign soldiers from perishing of thirst, were paid in depreciated colonial script. Villages were shelled, water wells were poisoned with motor oil to deny them to the enemy, and livestock were slaughtered to feed retreating columns. When the great armies finally packed up their tents and sailed home to write their memoirs and celebrate their chivalrous "war without hate," they left the bill behind.
That bill remains unpaid to this day, buried a few inches beneath the dust. The coastal plains of Egypt and Libya are still among the most heavily mined corridors on earth. For decades, Bedouin herders, farmers tending date palms, and children playing outside Tobruk and El Alamein have stepped on the unexploded artillery shells and landmines left by the British, Germans, and Italians. These are what the military historians casually call "the remnants of war," but to the families who have lost breadwinners and limbs three generations after the armistice, they are an enduring form of environmental violence. There is no chart in the rulebook for how many nomadic shepherds lose their camels to an ordnance dropped from a Heinkel bomber in 1942.
This is the quiet cost of how the Global South is remembered in the capitals of the North. It is perpetually the backdrop, never the protagonist. Whether it is a nineteenth-century treaty carved out in Berlin, an extraction concession signed in an air-conditioned room in Geneva, or a mammoth board game played over forty years in an American living room, our lands are routinely imagined as geography without society, resources without owners, and battlefields without grief.
I do not begrudge Mr. Taeger and Mr. Purcell their marathon of dice rolls and logistical tables; there is an innocent, human camaraderie in their shared endeavor. But as they spend the coming decades measuring the evaporation of fuel in the desert sun, we ought to remember that the real campaign never entirely ended for the people who actually live there. Long after the cardboard counters are packed back into their boxes, the communities of the Sahara and the Mediterranean coast will still be tending the scars left by foreign empires who treated their home as nothing more than a place to play.