An RPG community in Iraq takes their first steps outside D&D

As in most Arabic-speaking countries in West Asia and North Africa, Friday is the weekend in Iraq. So every second Friday, Board and Beyond try to organize RPG meet-ups in Baghdad. They find a swanky cafe that’s willing to host them from around 11 am to 4 pm. They put the word out on social media, and then they play games. Usually around 15-20 people show up and they get divided between the 5 or so regular dungeon masters — Dungeons & Dragons is their default game. 

“We have a very guided system,” said Mustafa, 26, to Rascal News in an interview. “The new players come to me. I'm the newbie guy. I teach them about roleplaying, how to enjoy the game in general, and how to not be afraid of making decisions.”

Once you’ve played a game with Mustafa, your next game is probably with someone else. “When they know the rules to level 3, they go to a different DM called Noor,” said Mustafa. “He's not a RAW [Rules as Written] guy, but he's the magnificent adventure guy… really big enemies and grand adventure.”

“People who just want to have a laugh, we send them to Maitham,” he said. Maitham is 24 and the founder of Board and Beyond. He’s the one who made the connections with the cafes and put the current group of DMs together (and the one who answered my messages to conduct this interview).

After that, you might get sent to Kevin. “Kevin, he knows a lot of the rules and he teaches them the consequences of their decisions,” said Mustafa. “Mostly, he kills them.” 

 At “almost 40”, Kevin is the senior citizen of the group or, as Mustafa puts it, “the big brain guy”. He’s the one with the most experience playing RPGs. Like a lot of people, he discovered the game through actual play videos on YouTube. “It was High Rollers,”  said Kevin, in the same interview. “And I got interested in the game. So, I messaged some of my close friends, and we started playing. We played through two campaigns, over a year each. That was about nine years ago.” 

D&D (and RPGs in general) is a new hobby in Iraq. Its presence borne on the back of the same cultural wave that has carried it all over the world: Stranger Things, Baldur’s Gate 3, and of course, the D&D movie, Honor Among Thieves. Right after the film hit theatres in Baghdad, Board and Beyond had their biggest event ever with 35-40 people suddenly showing up, leaving the organizers and DMs scrambling to fit all the new faces into games. Actual play shows like Critical Role, Dimension 20, and Glass Cannon also play their part, and Mustafa estimated maybe 15-20% of attendees have watched people play RPGs before they attend and pick up the dice themselves. But mostly, they come fresh, hopping over from adjacent geeky hobbies like fantasy fiction, board games, and video games.

The group behind Board and Beyond organized their first event in 2022, even before they had picked out a name. Now, they’ve streamlined the process and have now been holding regular fortnightly sessions since the second half of 2025. They even held a special one-off D&D camping trip, where a group trekked out onto a nearby mountain and played through the night. While the majority of regular attendees are men, it’s not homogenous. “We actually have lots of women interested… and we have three women DMs,” said Kevin. Trying to think if anyone over 40 has ever joined, they remember Maitham’s father and friends rolled up for a game and took to it easily enough.

As a physical event, Board and Beyond don’t really have an online presence, apart from their Instagram account. “For online players who can't attend the sessions — because we have our day jobs, so we can't manage an online community as well — we send them to Square and Hexagon for online gaming,” said Kevin. Square and Hexagon is a Kuwait-based Discord community, and given that they also speak Arabic, it’s easy for Iraqi players to join. “Kuwaiti culture is not so different than our culture,” said Mustafa. “And they're mostly taking inspiration from European and American stories, so not that much different in reality.”

There’s a difference between English and Arabic beyond mere language divide that affects why and how people play. “We have people who are good in English, and they prefer English as a way of either learning the language, or because they think the game will be better in it, and there are people that prefer Arabic,” said Kevin.

“We tried to create a unique campaign full of Arabic culture and Arabic lore, specifically Iraqi lore, and we put our fantasy twist on it,” said Mustafa. “When I run this campaign, I try to speak in Arabic, pure Arabic, not even Iraqi, but the players… some of them joined me and enjoyed it, and some of them just felt a little bit odd.”

The oddness is a layered thing. “People sometimes feel embarrassed of acting in Arabic, so they try to act in English. I'm trying to encourage them to roleplay in Arabic, but sometimes [even] I feel a little bit shy,” said Mustafa. Part of the problem is that Arabic has deep and myriad conventions around conveying emotions.

“[People] cannot put their feelings… their excessive feelings in Arabic words without meaning much more,” said Mustafa. “For a simple example, ‘I like you’ in English is a very simple word to say [to convey that] you admire someone, or you just like that someone. In Arabic, there is no simple way to say that. You have to say, ‘أنا معجب بك’, which is a very big thing… [bigger] than ‘I like you’. Or I can say, I love you [in Arabic]. It is really hard to communicate small feelings in Arabic.”

The big frontier ahead of the Board and Beyond team is playing other games. “We're trying to broaden our horizon with more than D&D,” said Mustafa. “D&D is cool and all, but we want to make our community experience a lot of different angles of tabletop RPGs. We don't have a [concrete] plan, but we're thinking of creating sessions for war games like Warhammer 40k.”

To that end, they’ve been reaching out to publishers around the world, asking for games and resources. “I basically sent emails to several tabletop RPG companies and publishers,” said Kevin. “We received replies and collaboration from Traveller, Mongoose Publishing, R Talsorian Games for Cyberpunk and The Witcher, and we have a meeting with Chaosium coming up … and of course, Free League, they gave us some of their games. We're gonna start running these new systems after Ramadan.”

That said, their excitement for new games is tempered by the same challenges that indie gamers face elsewhere. “To be fully clear, we're not telling our people we’re going to run new systems. They will be scared,” said Mustafa. “We want to introduce other tabletop RPGs gradually,” added Kevin. “We are not gonna mention the system but we're gonna mention the theme… This will be a horror setting, or this will be a cyberpunk, futuristic setting.”

But challenge or not, they're still excited. They all have jobs and all the other usual responsibilities that life comes with, but they want to spread the joy that the hobby brings them. “Board and Beyond is a passion project for us who are enjoying playing tabletop RPGs to share it with our Iraqi community”, said Mustafa. “Our goal is to reach as many people as we can to make them enjoy these different types of games, to just join us in our journey of making stories, and we're trying to recruit more DMs. We're kind of like a small cult."