Why did we decide to do a game of Operation Crusader? Despite the fact that we love making games, we’re not entirely sure ourselves. There are many reasons why we think that the battles of North Africa make great gaming stuff and why the campaign was so fascinating, but at the forefront must be the place itself and the mystery and spectacle that surrounds it. At first we thought that the desert, is in a sense, a (nearly) literal sandbox where we can study tank to tank combat and fighting in near laboratory conditions. But as we read on and on, piling combat histories, academic studies, and oral narratives upon each other, we discovered that desert combat was anything but clinical.