This game started when Sarah and I made our first trip to Spain for our honeymoon over 16 years ago, and I was immediately struck by the beautiful nuances of the country’s history. When we arrived, I had been a student of Spanish for as long as I’d been in school, and was excited to show off my Spanish skills to my new wife. Instead, I looked like any other clueless tourist when we arrived in Barcelona, where Catalan is the primary language. Later, as we went south in our later travels to the peninsula, I began to learn and experience the obvious influence that Arabic and Berber culture had in the architecture, music, language, and food around us.

After many trips to the peninsula since, I’ve consistently been fascinated by what I’ve seen, learned, experienced -- and of course, ate and drank. As I continued to delve deeper into the history, I found the history books laid out what I saw so clearly around me:

Knowledge flows to where its welcomed, and philosophy, science, and advanced art were nearly completely lost in Europe during the Dark Ages. These methods were incubated and advanced in the Islamic World before returning to Europe – very often through Spain!
Culture is never an island, but built upon and grown from the cultures of “others” that are often reviled later in history. Spanish culture and a vast array of concepts and ideas grew from Islamic kingdoms, which Isabelle and Ferdinand attempted to wipe out from their own history.
Religion alone often does not define people, but is another method for groups to organize themselves without excluding others in their community. For the vast majority of the “Reconquista” time period, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived, collaborated, worked, and fought together for their own local kingdoms or emirates – far more often than they fought against each other based solely on religious identity.

History is often taught with important dates, people, and battles, though reading the news will quickly show you how these headlines are like a single photograph in a family album. The wedding, graduation, or funeral photos are just the culmination of an entire album of stories, relationships, decisions, and people that came before and after it. Without them, the headlines would just be nonsense and useless.

Iberia: Kings and Emirs is fundamentally about the stories humans tell ourselves, and the political pressures rulers face when dealing with diverse stories within their lands. By simulating the nearly 200 years of history of the game, players get to experience the broader story, and reality, of this period that has been simplified into “The Reconquest of Spain”. Each time a player engages with a real historical figure from the time, or when they must update the demographics of their kingdom after gaining a new region, they wrestle with the calculations that led to the famous rulers, battles, and dates we see in the headlines of history.

I found that medieval Spain and Portugal were beautiful histories to invite people to play with these concepts. Within 2 hours, players wrestle with religious diversity, tolerance, extremism, history of intellectual progress, war-as-politics, and religion-as-politics, all while having a blast and admiring art that reveals the beautiful places and people of the peninsula.

Ultimately, I want players to walk away with a deeper appreciation for the messy, human history that lies beneath our tidy, oversimplified historical narratives. This game is for those who love the human decisions behind strategy, history, and politics, but also appreciate a clear winner and an earlier bedtime. It's a game that wrestles with complexity without taking your entire night—because the real world is complicated enough.

Why Iberia?

Why Balance of Powers Now?