Making Moves: Reading Saudi Social Change through Commercial Tabletop Games

While the promotion of “entertainment” has been a touchstone of policy changes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia of late, most media and academic focus has been on large‑scale spectacles that reflect top‑down efforts of the Saudi state to effect economic and social change. In this article, I look to smaller‑scale cultural production – the nascent Saudi tabletop games industry – to understand how Saudi entrepreneurs evoke, adapt, or subtly contest state narratives to advance projects of self‑improvement, social reform, and above all commercial retail. Drawing on interviews with several board‑game entrepreneurs as well as several recent Saudi‑produced games, I note that these games draw on a sense of national authenticity to appeal to consumers – “Buy Saudi!” – as well as to provide an immersive gaming experience. However, the worlds constructed by these Saudi‑themed game narratives in turn suggest that pre‑existing inequalities of wealth and social influence heavily structure individuals’ chances in life, even if game developers themselves more directly echo the emphasis on self‑reliance embedded in recent state development narratives. Finally, while Saudi games entrepreneurs echo their counterparts worldwide in highlighting the low‑tech, “natural” community‑building properties of tabletop games, this narrative remains ever‑so‑slightly at odds with the futurism of state narratives that instead stress the importance of building a hi‑tech, digitally networked future for Saudi society.