The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues.

Each round begins with an adviser stating "Hamurabi: I beg to report to you" the current status of the city, including the prior year's harvest and change in population, followed by a series of questions as to how many bushels of grain to spend on land, seeds, and feeding the people.

The end-game appraisal, added in the 1973 version of the game, compares the player to historical rulers—such as "Your heavy-handed performance smacks of Nero and Ivan IV.

[3][5] In 1968, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Richard Merrill invented the FOCAL programming language.

[9] The final game was, according to Dyment, "the largest piece of FOCAL-8 code that could fit in a 4K machine: there was literally not room for a single extra character".

As a result, the game uses shortened forms for much of the text, including spelling the player-controlled ruler, changed from Luduga to the Babylonian king Hammurabi, as "Hamurabi".

[10] The 1973 DECUS catalog additionally lists a French-language version by Belgians J. F. Champarnaud and F. H. Bostem for the FOCAL-69 version of the language,[11] and a 1978 catalog adds Ruben by James R. B. Howard II and Jimmie B. Fletcher, "a modification of the 'King of Sumeria' game" with additional features.

[13] The new version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end-of-game performance appraisal, based on a similar concept in James A. Storer's The Pollution Game (1970).

The Pollution Game (1970) by James A. Storer,[16] and Kingdom by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros, written for mainframe computers in 1972 and in BASIC in 1975, which was then expanded to Dukedom (1976).

[17][18] Other derivations include Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (1978) by George Blank; Santa Paravia added the concept of city building management to the basic structure of Hamurabi, making it an antecedent to the city-building genre as well as an early strategy game.

[19] A conversion of this game was included on the BBC Micro's Welcome Tape and Welcome Disc as Yellow River Kingdom (1981).