Haki w Hitan, literally Tales and Walls, is a new board game in development by Palestinian designers Dima Nassar and Dania Omari, inspired by the absurdity of life and sense of community within the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Exhibited recently at Comicon Napoli, Italy, it’s been in development since 2024, and “empowers players to strategize, plan, and make decisions, only to discover that, just like in real life, control is often an illusion”, as the effects of living under Israeli occupation disrupt the continuity of daily life.
According to a crowd funding campaign to support the development of the game, the goal of the game is “to occupy zones of the city (Areas A, B, and C) just as they exist in reality, marked in blue, green, and purple” – but “the occupation interferes in the smallest details, mirrored in the gameplay through red ‘chaos cards’ that disrupt even the best-laid plans”.
The game has been developed by visual artist and product designer Dima Nassar and her cousin Dania Omari, an architect and comic artist. Writing in the crowd-funding campaign, they state “we decided to transform our stories into something tangible: a board game that reflects Ramallah’s reality on a physical level”.
In an interview with Wired Italy, Nassar and Omari say that while this is a strategy board game, it’s a game that reflects life without total control; Israeli security service raids might shut down a meeting, or a friend’s father might be released from prison, suddenly making spending time with him becomes a priority. Just as in their real life, players have to adapt rapidly to the unplanned and unpredictable.
The crowd-funder describes the game as a “way to experience Ramallah’s daily life through strategy, humor, frustration, and hope”, and “a living archive of Palestine, a space where collective memory, politics, and society converge”. “Every character in the game is inspired by real people from Ramallah’s diverse social classes, each carrying their own strengths and struggles.”
If you know of work from other Palestinian games designers, we’d love to hear about it in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
