Pretty Fun · In development

Games celebrating the Eritrean culture.

Our founder is Eritrean. It's a country with a modernist capital the world has barely photographed, nine languages held as equals, a railway rebuilt by hand, and a national obsession with bicycle racing — and almost none of that has ever made it onto a game board. So we're starting there.

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An assortment of wooden board-game pieces, tiles and tokens beside an open linen bag.

The lineup

The first four.

Cream and terracotta architectural game tiles laid out in a curve with wooden marker cubes.

Asmera

ኣስመራ they made them unite

The city's own name is said to come from the four clans who were brought together to found it — which is the whole game. A tile-laying build through a modernist capital that UNESCO listed in 2017 and the world has barely photographed, including a 1938 filling station shaped like an aeroplane whose concrete wings hold up nothing at all.

Game cards fanned out in an arc, each carrying a different coloured geometric shape, beside a stack of wooden tokens.

Tish'ate

ትሽዓተ nine

Nine peoples, nine languages, one country — and no single official one. A set-collection card game about a place that decided equal footing was simpler than picking a winner.

Carved wooden train tokens on pale grey track tiles stepping upward like a staircase.

Babur

ባቡር train

Sea level to seven thousand feet on a narrow gauge. Route-building up switchbacks and through tunnels to Mitsiwa on a railway that was wrecked in the war, then rebuilt largely by hand with salvaged parts.

Six brightly painted wooden game markers packed together like a bunch of riders on a strip of road tile.

Bishkleta

ብሽክለታ bicycle, from the Italian

Even the word arrived from somewhere else and was made local — which is the story of Eritrean cycling in one noun. A racing game about how a Horn of Africa nation ended up putting riders in the polka-dot and green jerseys at the Tour de France.

A round unglazed clay coffee pot with a long neck, beside small handleless cups on a woven tray.

Jebena

ጀበና the clay coffee pot

Three rounds, one pot, and no way to hurry it. The coffee ceremony runs well past an hour and the length is the entire point — so this is a slow game for a full table, where finishing first wins you nothing.

None of these are finished, and the Tigrinya here is our best effort rather than the last word — a native speaker is checking every name. Tish'ate in particular is being built with people from each of the nine communities rather than about them. That takes as long as it takes, and we would rather be late than wrong.

The family

Pretty Life is bigger than one shelf.

Everything we make has to earn its place in your day. If it isn't genuinely good, it doesn't get the name.

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