Settlers of Catan Appears in Hebrew; Tactica Stays Open

Gilad Yarnitzky passed along two bits of game-related news from Israel, starting with the Hebrew edition of The Settlers of Catan from a publisher named Hakubia – which Gilad says translates as “the die.” Says Yarnitzky, “This is the game that brought many people into the field of board gaming, so maybe now that it is in Hebrew it will give the field a boost.”

(While I knew that Hebrew was written right-to-left, I had not previously considered how numbers and non-Hebrew words would appear in Hebrew text. Looking at the Hakubia website gave me my answer: They appear left-to-right just as they do elsewhere. A bit of research into this topic led me to this old article by an Isreali web developer on the difficulties of designing websites for bidirectional languages like Hebrew and Arabic. Fascinating stuff...)

The second item of interest is that the owner of Tactica Games in Tel-Aviv – first referenced in a Nov. 2007 item on BGN – has decided to stay open for at least one more year, a sign that an audience of gamers does exist in the area.

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