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North Africa

Sahara Trading

A trading game across the trans-Saharan routes, moving goods between Marrakech, Agadez, Timbuktu, Kano and Cairo while managing water, food and the hazards of the crossing.

Played in: Morocco · Niger · Mali · Nigeria · Egypt

— The board

Play against the machine. Your best score is kept in this browser only — nothing is sent to the archive.

Click or tap to play. Keyboard works too where the game uses it.

— What is playing against you

Nothing plays against you — obstacles arrive on a timer.

No opponent — a timer or a spawner
Nothing is playing against you. There is no opponent in this game at all — no model of you, no plan, no choices being weighed. What feels like an adversary is a spawn timer and a random number generator: obstacles appear on a schedule that tightens as your score rises. This is worth noticing precisely because it can feel otherwise. Difficulty that rises with time reads as an opponent responding to you, and it is not.

Compare every opponent in the archive →

What this version is not

The cities and the fact of the routes between them are real, and the trans-Saharan trade in salt, gold, cloth and — inseparably — enslaved people shaped West African states for centuries. The economics here are invented: prices, distances, travel times and random events are game mechanics with no historical basis, and the human traffic that made these routes what they were does not appear. Treat it as a prompt to read about the trade, not as a model of it.

— Sources

No sources have been attached to this entry yet. Until they are, treat everything above as provisional.

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