Board game-designers in India are reimagining games from centuries ago

While the Chaupad (or pachisi) is one example of a board game mentioned in the Mahabharata that has been reinvented, several others from India are now getting a new lease of life

All of us would agree that for the most part, 2020 was a year straight out of a Black Mirror episode. During such a time, one of the (very) few silver linings of what seemed like the apocalypse was that it allowed us, the privileged lot, time for introspection and shifting gears towards things we really love doing. Sidhant Chand’s story follows a similar trajectory. During the pandemic, the Odisha-born took a professional U-turn from being a chemical engineer at an American consulting firm to a board game designer.

But it was far from a sudden move for Chand. In fact, his love for board games goes back to his college days in Odisha. “Me and my friends had a lot of free time back in the hostel. We used to take existing board games, like Monopoly, remove the parts we didn't like about it, and add our own stuff. For example, Monopoly went on forever and ever. So we introduced bidding mechanics to Monopoly, and instead of properties, you are actually bidding on industries.”

Chand belongs to a small but thriving community of Indian board game-designers who have catapulted to fame during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the board game industry witnessed an unprecedented spike. Offering a much-needed break from screen time and all the distressing news, board games offered the perfect way to spend time indoors with one’s family. Naturally, its sales spiked the world over. In the US, a board game seller reported a 4,000 per cent increase in sales on Amazon whereas in the UK, sales of board games and jigsaw puzzles went up by 240 per cent during the first week of the lockdown. In India, board game communities like ReRoll, Victory, and Meeples were formed in Bengaluru along with cafes like Dice n Dine. In Mumbai, board game enthusiasts formed Tabletop Nerds, with people beginning to throng board game cafes like Creeda, Pair A Dice, and Chai & Games.

Early beginnings

However, India’s tryst with board games is anything but new. Chaupad (or pachisi), a symmetrical cross-shaped board played with cowrie shells, finds mention in the Mahabharata. Pachisi was reintroduced to India by the British as the widely popular Ludo back in 1950. Developed around the 6th century CE, Chaturanga was one of the more popular games of ancient India. It first appeared in Mahabharata and Ramayana, and has since been widely played as shatranj and, more recently, chess. Backgammon, which is believed to have emerged around the early Gupta period, found representation as the game of Shiva and Parvati at various temples in the Ellora Caves. Dating back to the 16th century, Fatehpur Sikri, built by Akbar features a large Pachisi courtyard that came alive during festivals as a giant outdoor board. Akbar’s court historian Abul Fazal Allami even wrote how Pachisi matches would go on for days, with the emperor often meting out punishment to anyone who displayed uneasiness with the game. Safe to say that the emperor was a board game enthusiast. 

If Chennai-based businesswoman and journalist Vinita Sidhartha’s Kreeda Games and its 20-year-long successful run prove anything, it is that these old board games continue to hold charm even among the younger lot. Sidhartha, in fact, started Kreeda as a side project because her kids, who were babysat by their grandparents, enjoyed not only their company, but also the board games they played. Her games include the old Chaupad; Pallanguzhi, a traditional ancient game of distribution and counting played in South India; a Ramayana series with three games, namely Vanavas, Finding Sita, and The Battle of Lanka, among others. Her design inspiration for these games come straight from what Sidhartha believes are the best sources of information—engravings on temples and monuments. “We document games from temples and monuments. In the non-renovated temples of South India in particular, you'll find incredible games scratched on the floors. It’s a huge source of information for us.”

But how are the  games which were played hundreds of years ago still enjoyed by people today? Sidhartha attributes it to the timelessness of traditional board games. “The beauty of traditional games is they cut across culture, creed, language, age, education, and upbringing because they're so elemental in nature. My research for board games has taken me across the world and I have found so many similarities in diverse places. The South Americans, for example, play a game which looks a lot like our Chaupad. I often say we are actually linked by our games. Our clothes and food may differ, but games have a lot of similarities. Through traditional games, we can go back to our roots to understand how we connect as human beings across the world.”

Propelled by the pandemic 

Sidhartha is of the opinion that the appreciation for board games was building long before the pandemic struck. What it did, though, was inspire “a greater pride in Indianness and our culture, our music, heritage, movies, stars, sports, whatever it is.” And she is right. A majority of the board games designed and launched in the past three years, albeit diverse in their storytelling and design, have one thing in common—they have India at their heart. From history to politics, geography to mythology and culture, modern Indian strategy-based board games cover the whole gamut. 

Chand’s manipulation of Monopoly in his college days led up to his biggest game yet, the soon-to-be-launched Tycoon 1981 by his company Zenwood Games. Premised on India’s industrial revolution, the game requires players to represent ‘big industrial houses of India that are trying to dominate the six key industrial sectors—minerals, fuel, agro, power, transport, and finance—by obtaining the rights from the government and building factories on a map of India. Although the goal is to be rich, they must try to influence national policies to their favour, as well as gain political votes to break ties, all while balancing wealth and fame in a series of rounds that will ultimately decide one winner’, as explained on its official website. “I realised because there's a lack of Indian-themed games in the market, it would be a good opportunity to have some Indian flavour, be it in the art, the name or in the components of the game. With Tycoon, I also wanted to address the gap to fulfill the needs of the heavy gamers or those who love to bend their minds over an hour or two just to figure out a game and outwit their friends,” says Chand. 

Bengaluru-based Sindhu Kulkarni, too, hopped onto the bandwagon during the pandemic to bring Indian stories to people’s table tops with her company Tacit Games. She, along with her husband Kiran Kulkarni, started off by selling intricately designed Indian-themed puzzles. “India has so many stories to tell that we are not telling; it has so many visual art traditions that we are not bringing out. So we thought of a way to work with craftsmen and artisans and design products which can stem from these things. And the simplest and the most beautiful thing we could think of was jigsaw puzzles—it doesn't really need a learning curve and anyone can take it up.”

Apart from 10 puzzles, Tacit Games has two board games, one of them being ‘Hampi & the Sun Jewel,’ premised on the ancient South Indian village of Hampi, popular for its temple complexes dating back to the Vijayanagara Empire. “We are from Karnataka, and we both are architects. Hampi is that one place which has always had this grandeur. It is a place very close to most architects’ hearts due to its amazing architecture. The first story we are trying to tell with the game is that of the Sun Jewel, and as to why a place like Hampi became so prosperous.” Sindhu adds that Hampi & the Sun Jewel was designed to cater to a wide demographic ranging from 25-45 years, who can play together. 

Resonating with one’s roots

“All our games are deeply rooted—you'll see some aspect of Indian culture,” says Phalgun Polepalli, one half of Dice Toy Labs, and the publisher of games like Indus 2500 BCE, Karigar-e-Taj, Yudh Bhoomi, Chai Garam, and its latest, Vallamkali, based on the boat races of Allapuzha. Pollepali’s was one of the first Indian board game companies to attend the Essen Game Fair in Germany—the world’s largest annual board game trade fair—in October 2022. “There were always some games with Indian names but had nothing to do with India, both in Essen and otherwise. So our games attracted a lot of excitement. In fact, we didn't realise that out of the 12,000 games on display there, some YouTubers and bloggers who are supremely popular within the community had chosen our games as the topmost anticipated ones at Essen.” 

For Polepalli, the conceptualisation of games with a long shelf life, those that can be played again and again and with people across age groups involves interacting with the community to understand their interests. “There are multiple ways to figure out what would be the next big thing. One of them is to talk to the community, whether it's a design community or our customer base or the fans and followers we have. We try to think of what it is that intrigues someone when it comes to India, which will be equally exciting for an international customer. We do this through simple Instagram story polls, asking people what they would like to play. But in India, if you explain even the simplest games, people will say it’s super complex. So we had to rework on the product strategy to figure out what both Indians and the international crowd would want to play.” 

But even with bang-on concepts and designs, getting games manufactured to match international standards remains one of the biggest challenges for Indian board game makers. With a majority of board game printers concentrated in China, and a lack of printers specialising in board game printing in India, many Indian designers have taken to training printers of sweet boxes, playing cards, and even those ,making pizza boxes, as in the case of Sidhartha. “The printing aspect is obviously very nasty because we only trained the existing printers to develop their technologies in order to print board games. Which is why there is a lot of experimentation going on with manufacturing. We do try to work with them, train them, give them samples, but there still is a lot of back and forth due to quality issues and delays. It is, however, slowly evolving—there are fewer errors and an improvement in quality. But there's still a long way to go.”

Despite the challenges and the country’s nascency in warming up to modern Indian board games, Pollepali, like Chand, is of the opinion that, “The era of Indian board games is starting. It's going to be the next big thing on the global scale. And I think the next two to three years will be an exciting time.”

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