Mumbai Board Gamers

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’.

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.

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.