Ishtar: Gardens of Babylon

At the very heart of the desert, the scorching sun and the arid sands impose their will. Yet Goddess Ishtar gave you the most precious of gifts.

Water.

Now, gardeners, it’s time to prove that you are worthy of such a gift. Take control of the fountains, collect resources, grow flowers, and plant trees. Only the best of you will manage to create a wonderful garden, and deserve the right to set the foundations for the legendary Babylon…

An Enchanting Garden for the King

In Ishtar – The Gardens of Babylon, flowerbeds and rows of trees will grant you many victory points. All gardeners play on the same garden, which means that you have to carefully place your vegetation tiles, while strategically placing your assistants to control them.

Endless Strategies

Babylon wasn’t built in a day. A lot of water will flow from the fountains before you become an experienced gardener. Ishtar – The Gardens of Babylon is an exceptional game, easy to learn, but with room for many different strategies. Discovering the game only takes a few minutes, but mastering it takes months, as in a game of Go (which served as inspiration for the designers). One game after the other, you’ll discover the subtleties of Ishtar.

A game by Bruno Cathala & Evan Singh

Bruno Cathala is a world-renowned designer, who authored and co-authored hundreds of games. With IELLO, he has previously co-designed the great Kanagawa, along with its expansion Kanagawa: Yokaï, and the official two-player variant for Happy Pigs. He is trusting IELLO again in 2019 with Ishtar – Gardens of Babylon.

Evan Singh is a designer who is using a pseudonym to fulfill his or her wish to remain anonymous.

Together, they merged their creativity to invent and develop Ishtar, an accessible but deep game with intense player interaction and exceptional replayability.

Superb illustrations by Biboun

Biboun is a very talented artist who collaborated with IELLO on various projects such as Raids, Happy Pigs, and Nyet. He is a particularly involved illustrator, who loves to pay attention to details in order to enhance his project’s nuances. As comfortable with illustrations as with character design, he creates strong universes inspired by realism but extending them into the imaginary.

Ishtar’s art direction is based on the gardens of Babylon and the mythology of Goddess Ishtar, a source of life and fertility. Its illustrations invite players to make life appear in the desert with ever-growing vegetation… as they wish!