When we were kids
we used to spend our days playing games with friends, usually without bothering
about anything else. As we grew up, we continued playing games with our friends,
only now the games weren’t limited to dice or boards or pawns. The words
‘business’ , ‘monopoly’, ‘ludo’, ‘snakes & ladders’ or ‘chinese chekkers’
always bring a smile to my face as they remind me of those wonderful childhood
days. Sometimes I miss playing these games. I tend to wonder why I grew up to
busy myself with this corporate life. For those who liked such games played
other games like ‘scrabble’, ‘the game of life’, ‘pictionary’, ‘scotland yard’.
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| Eclipse |
I recently came
across this group of enthusiastic ‘board gamers’ who meet almost every week to
play board games. These games are not games which you would have normally played
before. These games are more advanced and they need strategies, thinking and
anticipating your opponent’s moves. The games have gigantic boards with
hundreds of pawns with which you can perform various actions. To name a few - ‘Eclipse’
is a game which involves space age battle, ‘Civilization’ on the other hand allows you to build your own civilization, promote
your own culture and win battles, ‘Powergrid’ makes you use resources like oil,
coal, money to power cities which you control. There are more than 100 such
games with them.
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| Stone Age |
So if you are in
Mumbai and want to spend your time in a constructive manner then I suggest you
should try out at least one session with them. If you feel you don’t know how
to play these games, then worry not, they are kind enough to explain all the
rules in detail and before starting a game they do conduct a trial game. Games
vary across all genres and difficulty with number of players ranging from 2-10
depending on the game. Some games need 1-2 hours whereas some may even take 5-6
hours to finish. These sessions are organized all over Mumbai but generally at
Parel, Mahalaxmi, Bandra and Juhu.
The Mumbai Board
Gamers was formed 5 months back. They already have around 100 members. The
people in the group are down to earth and very helping. Some of them are alumni
of IITs and IIMs also. One needs to just
give their time and dutch in for whatever they eat / drink, rest everything is
on the house.
I joined them
last week and have already attended four sessions and it is truly addictive. It’s
certainly better than watching a sitcom or lazing around watching TV. Some of
these games are also part of business school games. And additionally it serves
the purposes of networking and meeting new people.
You can reach
them by joining Mumbai BoardGamers or for any details / queries please leave a comment here or get in
touch with me @gaurav_agrawall on twitter.
