From Catan to Community: How Board Games Are Rewiring Malta One Dice Roll at a Time

Board games “have the power to transform our view of the world” – and nowhere is that truer than on the sun-bleached limestone streets of Malta.

On any given Wednesday evening, the back room of The Comic Conspiracy in Msida rattles with laughter and the clatter of meeples. Students, pensioners, off-duty chefs and government clerks huddle around tables, negotiating wheat-for-ore trades in Catan or plotting alliances in Ticket to Ride: Europe, their maps stretched across a table that looks suspiciously like the old Gozo ferry timetable. Here, the only thing louder than the dice is the Maltese banter.

“Board games let us rehearse life without the real-world consequences,” says Sarah Camilleri, co-founder of Malta Board Game Arena, the island’s fastest-growing tabletop club. “In a country where everyone knows everyone else’s nanna, games create a neutral space where a Nationalist voter can scheme with a Labour die-hard, or a hunter can ally with a bird-watcher. The labels fall away.”

That alchemy is precisely what academic Dr. Karl Borg spotted when he launched “Play for Peace”, a University of Malta project that brings settlers and newly arrived migrants together over multilingual copies of Dixit and Codenames. “Malta’s history is one of constant arrival—Phoenicians, Knights, Brits, tech nomads,” Borg notes. “Board games compress centuries of cultural negotiation into 45-minute sessions. A Syrian teen teaches a Maltese retiree the Arabic word for ‘camel’; the retiree counters with ‘għasfur’. Suddenly the Mediterranean feels smaller, kinder.”

The transformation is visible at the grassroots. In Birgu, the Inquisitor’s Palace—once a symbol of suspicion—now hosts monthly “Cittadella Game Nights” where families unpack Azul’s Moorish tiles beneath baroque ceilings. Tickets sell out in minutes. “It’s subversive,” laughs curator Maria Vella. “We’re literally playing on the stones of the past, rewriting the narrative from inquisition to inclusion.”

Even the island’s festa committees have joined in. This summer, the St Julian’s band club swapped the usual brass-band rehearsal for a cooperative round of Pandemic: Iberia. “We still argued,” admits committee president Etienne Bezzina, “but instead of fireworks budgets, we fought over how many barrels of clean water to ship to Gozo. Same adrenaline, healthier outcome.”

Retailers report parallel growth. Sliema shop Level Up saw board-game sales jump 63 % in 2023, fuelled by Maltese-language editions of Carcassonne and Splendor. “Parents want to unplug their kids from TikTok, but they also want something that feels Maltese,” explains manager Ritienne Pace. She gestures to a shelf where bilingual rulebooks sit beside packs of honey-ring nougat—impulse buys at the till.

The impact ripples beyond leisure. Malta’s gaming cafés are quietly becoming incubators for civic innovation. Earlier this year, Transport Malta invited regulars at Valletta café Knight Moves to prototype a Malta-themed version of Ticket to Ride. The result—Ferry Hopping: Malta Edition—will debut at Notte Bianca, its routes stretching from the Three Cities to the Blue Lagoon, complete with storm cards that cancel trips when the weather turns “Gozitan”. Profits go to the Community Chest Fund.

Yet perhaps the most profound shift is personal. For 19-year-old Liam Zahra, who grew up in sheltered Żebbuġ, Friday nights at the Birkirkara games hub cracked open a world he’d only seen on Netflix. “I sat opposite a Nigerian medical student and a 70-year-old Gozitan lace-maker,” he recalls. “We argued over strategy, then someone ordered pastizzi. By midnight we were planning a joint beach clean-up. A cardboard map rewired my idea of who belongs in Malta.”

As the EU’s smallest state grapples with rapid change—AI, migration, climate, identity—board games offer a uniquely Maltese antidote: convivial, argumentative, rooted in baroque squares and village band clubs, yet porous to every new arrival. Roll the dice, move your pawn, and the island redraws itself around the table.