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| Edited By: Ornella D'Souza |Source: DNA |Updated: Oct 21, 2018, 06:15 AM IST
Anirudh Gupta, 27, a freelance Board Game (BG) designer, remembers playing board games such as Scotland Yard, Life, Monopoly, Crudo, puzzles, and card games with cousins since the age of three. After an MBA degree, a stint with Delhi-based Frank Educational Aids Pvt Ltd, he designed Mind Your Word, the first board game from India to win a place at a German expo. "In this co-operative word-game, you can steal others' points to win. Corporates use it in their team building exercises."
Today, armed with a Board Game Design course from MIT Boston, Gupta is buzzing with new BG concepts. An upcoming cooking game has recipes and kitchen assignments to encourage kids and men to cook. He's working on his "magnum opus" – a limited edition travel game on India, where participants have to cut through epics, touristy spots and historical landmarks to collect objects. Gupta, who owns over 100 games, is a flexible player. "I play Knots and Crosses with my six-year-old niece, Candyland with a 10-year-old, and Dungeons & Dragons the whole week with 30-year-olds," he says. He also attends Board Game Bash – a BG meetup that gets together twice a month. BGs to him are "an open canvas in a closed box", because he's seen broken friendships mend, the anxious and depressed, and nerds and geeks, lose their inhibitions and get happily animated by the end of a game.
"If water were to spill on the table, I'd save the BG over my phone," chuckles 28-year-old Riddhi Dalal, owner of Mumbai's only BG cafe, Creeda (Sanskrit for 'play'). Dalal craved for a dedicated gaming space after she was asked to vacate a coffee shop at 1am in the middle of playing Crudo, and tired of cafes turning down her friends and her from playing BGs, assuming it's a ploy to gamble. This led her to start Creeda Gaming Cafe in Colaba three-and-a-half years ago. The avid traveler packs a BG on every trip, and buys new games that are indigenous to the traveled land.
She's also a geek on the subject. "South Korea loves BGs. The Middle-East loves Backgammon. Mancala [wooden board with marbles] is traditionally African. Okey, similar to Rummikub, is popular in Turkey. Indian chess first involved four players and didn't involve much strategy. Only after travelling to Turkey, on account of marriage alliances, it came back as a two-player game..." she can go on. Creeda, among its 350+ games, also stocks traditional Indian BGs, the highlight being Pachisi, a silk and jute hand-painted set from Mysore.
"I'm very choosy with who I play and play by the rules. I don't like area control games, but I prefer co-op games – where either everyone wins or the board wins, and abstract strategy games that have no fixed line of movement," says Dalal, who's developed a knack for fixing the right type of game with the right crowd. Cards of all the games at Creeda wear sleeves and the chips are still shiny, even after three and a half years of play.
Allan D'Souza's interest in BGs piqued after a competitive game of Catan two years ago. From then on, he'd buy one game every two months, and now owns over 50 BGs. He claims that his gaming group (called Game Knights) happily show up at his place to game every weekend because he has the biggest house and most understanding parents compare to the rest.
D'Souza, 29, who dabbled in designing mobile and PC games after an engineering degree, had to give up his dream of pursuing game design abroad to keep his family business of car rentals afloat. With Game Knights, he stays connected to the board. "We have a tradition where every member is gifted a BG on their birthday by other members. Many of us also belong to the church choir. So during Sequence, a BG that requires silence, one of us will start singing, and then everyone joins in."
D'Souza checks boardgamegeek.com that reviews the hottest games in the market for 30 minutes daily. Another eye is cocked on Spiel des Jahres, an award for the best board and card games of the year in Germany.
With three other mates, D'Souza is gearing to launch The Board Room, a venture that takes BGs to corporates and companies to inculcate team spirit, break the ice and improve social skills among employees.
For Chitrang J, who loves painting miniature BG models, achieving 'Tabletop quality' (average painting skill required to prep a miniature for a game) is not enough him. J, who was only introduced to new age BGs like the Vikings-themed Blood Rage last February, has already built a personal collection of 40 games. Before BGs, J used to assemble and paint robots from Anime series, Gundam. So painting characters from Blood Rage felt like an extension. Other hobbyists hit him up seeing his uploaded images of the painted models on Facebook, and invited him to join their meetups. Now, he paints for long hours on weekends at these meetups, exchanges tips and work in progress images with his groups. He's also switched from local alternatives to expensive pigments from the US and brushes from UK. To ensure the paint doesn't chip on the plastic models, he applies a primer and a protective coat after painting. Painting one mini figure can take him anything between a couple of days to weeks, as often he repaints a work if unsatisfied. Apart from preshading, shading and highlights, he's fussy about adding details like rock structures or lava to flat and circular bases the miniatures stand on. "I prefer realistic minis over cartoon-y stylised ones. I like the larger 72mm Vikings-Lord of the Rings kind of characters because they offer more room to paint than the 32mm and 48mm ones. It's therapeutic to paint and get your hands dirty in this digital age," says the 30-year-old product and branding designer.
Six years ago, Aziz Bookwalla relocated to Dubai from Pune on work. Every trip back, he'd bring along new BGs for his younger brother, Moiz. Aziz discovered he enjoys games that are simple, but not too trivial, while Moiz enjoys participating in BGs meetups – one session lasted nine hours of playing 40 games back-to-back. As their bonding and interest in the subject, the two launched The Bored Game Company, an online portal to buy desi and imported BGs, cards and accessories. Today, as the prize sponsors of The Great Indian Splendor Challenge, a multi-city BG competition, they've come a long way. But the market is yet not conducive to the business of selling BGs because "BGs are still seen as luxury items and taxed high," says Moiz, though their card sleeves and download-and-print games have quite the following. Their long term goals involve lending a platform to Indian BG designers and opening a BG cafe. "But right now, we want to increase inventory on our online store and supply games at reasonable rates," says Aziz.
Comics collector and writer Aniceto Pereira's Table Top India – a network for BGers – may have recently gone defunct after three years because "there are too many cafes to play games at now", he still has a choc-a-bloc board gaming schedule. Yesterday, he attended a Dungeons & Dragons game session (10am-10pm) session as a game master (a figure that role plays a board game character by improv acting). He's part of the same miniature-model painting group as Chitrang J and also part of a P&P (Print and Play) BGs group, which print out games which work out to be economically feasible. With another gamer, he makes game tiles from cardboard. Most of his friend circle are BGers, whose weddings he's attended, gone on holidays with, and continue to hang out at each other's homes for game nights. Pereira is now engrossed with Kingdom Death Monster, his latest expensive, import to join his 120 other BGs.
Pereira played his first unconventional BG, Agricola, (Latin for farmers) at a meetup, seven years ago. Pereira, also gives tuitions, co-runs an animation studio, and hosts an annual independent comics fest, The Indie Comix Fest. He has gamed for 24 hours, out of which he played 11 at a stretch. "BGs are a huge self learning and a good distraction."
