Iraqis love games. In every teahouse, one finds men of all ages slapping down domino pieces or praying for doubles over a backgammon board. Merchants take breaks from their establishments to play a few rounds of dama, a variant of checkers. In the evenings, families play the card game rummy into the wee hours.

In recent years, younger Iraqis have become addicted to online gaming, including Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, pronounced “pub-gee,” for short. Iraq’s parliament was so concerned that in April it voted almost unanimously to ban a suite of online games due to their potentially negative influence on the young. Like elsewhere, however, the lawmakers' paternalistic policy approach made the online games all the more popular. 

Lanah Haddad, an Iraqi Kurdish archaeologist, grew up in a family of gamers, but she eventually grew disillusioned with the games of strategy she was playing. Most of them were based on fantasy, but this clashed in her mind with the real richness of Iraq's heritage, which she had come to know through her excavations and other fieldwork. As she watched the Islamic State rip her country apart, Haddad decided to develop a strategy board game influenced by ancient Mesopotamia that could also positively impact Iraqi society.

“I thought a game could bring our culture closer to our community [today] … by bringing elements of Iraqi society closer to one another,” she told Al-Monitor.