BENGALURU: The past Friday evening was a lively affair at Siddharth Sikchi’s house. After multiple days of feeling the quarantine blues, the advertising professional decided to get out some board games and spent the next three-and-a-half hours learning how to play Catan with his flatmates. “You tend to get complacent when you’re home all the time. A board game was a great way to get my eyes away from the screen,” says the 26-year-old, who is also a regular at various board game meetups in the city. This, however, was his first time playing Catan, a game that involves a lot of negotiation with other players in order to get the best deal. “Every time you open social media, there’s an update about a new case or death. But while playing this game, for once, our conversations were about things besides Covid-19 or which vegetables to stock up on,” he says, adding that they are now considering which other game to invest in.
Sikchi isn’t alone. Many others in the city seem to also be turning towards board games in such times, finding respite in the escape and human connection it provides. Ever since ReRoll, a city-based board games collective, started their Tabletop Thursday meetups in September 2016, they’ve never missed any weekly get-together. But for the first time in years, they cancelled their meetup on March 12 this year and livestreamed an online game instead.
“It was just a way to keep the streak going,” says Karthik Balakrishnan, co-founder of the collective. The event saw 25-30 people take part over the two-hour stream, where participants played sketchful.io, an online game that is similar to pictionary. In order to keep their next online meetup the following Thursday more interactive, they livestreamed a quiz as well on YouTube. The 40-minute quiz on boardgames saw participation from 25 people, encouraging Balakrishnan to try out the same this week too. “But this time, our quiz is going to be a bit more hyperfocused on gamers. So participants can expect questions about the rules of a particular game or will have to look at the snippet of a boardgame and guess which one it belongs to,” he says.
Balakrishnan has been using games to connect with friends on a personal level too. This is the first time in years when the software engineer has played a game again with his friends, who are facing similar quarantine conditions in Australia and the United States. “Nine of us got together on a video call to play Sketchful and Diplomacy. We’re all in the same boat and now we’re getting to connect more too. The last time we played something together was in college so this is definitely fun,” he says.
For data engineer Abhiram R, online games with his friends have been helping him now. “I’ve always liked Scrabble but since we can’t play in person, online versions have been excellent substitutes. Right now, we’re a group of five. We have been playing on-and-off for hours on end,” he says.
Like many others out there, Radhika Timbadia too found some time now to get back to her love for games. The founder of Champaca Bookstore, Library and Cafe was ready for some distraction, something to stray her mind away from everything being shut to the anxiety of running a small business. “It was fun to play and online game of Dungeons and Dragons and not talk about work or Covid for a while,” she says.