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In the era of PlayStation and modern gaming, a community of gaming enthusiasts from the city is reviving the lost tradition of playing board games. Its members come together once a week to play classic and innovative board games.
“While earlier people used to play board games at get-togethers with their family and friends, now they play together at public platforms like ReRoll where they can also socialise,” said Karthik Balakrishnan, the founder of ReRoll, one of the first board game collectives in the city.
Victory Point, another popular board gaming community, co-founded by Nagkuldeep Vijayadevan, Janardhan Pasupathi and Nishanth Shankar, attracts gaming enthusiasts from all age groups.
Speaking about the board gaming scene in the city, Vijayadevan said: “It has a great fan following here. The only downside is that the popular board games are not easily available in India and we have to source it from abroad.”
These communities go beyond the traditional Monopoly and Ludo games to introduce first-timers to popular games like Avalon, Pandemic, and Terraforming Mars.
In Terraforming Mars, players take on the role of corporations working together to terraform the red planet (make it inhabitable) by raising the temperature, creating oxygen, water, plants and animal life.
Meanwhile, Pandemic is based on the premise that four diseases have broken out in the world, each threatening to wipe out a region.
The players have to work together to stop the diseases from spreading.
These games are divided into various categories like strategy, business, war, territorial control, secret identity among a host of others.
“We have had a steady increase in the number of people attending the meets. We bring board games from our own collections for the players,” said Sundeep
Jetty, a member of the founding team at Victory Point.
The communities also organise competitions and other events to popularise board gaming.