CHENNAI: The fascinating thing about board games is the pathways that the game pieces follow in the course of the game. In some they are defined by the throw of the dice. In some, it’s based on strategy.
What strikes me when I look at Indian traditional dice games, it is the absolute variety of pathways that one can take to reach the destination or the endpoint. In the simplest one like Parama Padam or the traditional Snakes and Ladders, everybody starts at the first point, and everybody ends at the same point.
However, if you take a game like Chaupad or Dhayakattam from which the more modern Ludo is born, the players start at different places on the board and each player has his own end space. Although players cross paths, the origin and destination are different and unique to each player.
There are other dice games where players start at two or three different places, but all end in the same place. There are games where people start at the same place but end in different places. And there is one unique board where the starting point of one player is the end point of the second and the end point of the second player is the starting point of the first. This variety of games and boards is fascinating.
If one were to take it as a metaphor for life itself, our games tell us that each of us has our own journeys. In some aspects of life, like our chronological growth and development, all of us may have the same journey from birth to our passing, which like the game of Parama Padam or Snakes and Ladders, has a point of origin and destination, although each of us complete it at our own pace.
In other games which denote most other aspects of life, we explore the fact that everybody’s journey is different. Sometimes we start at the same point but end in different places. Sometimes we start at different places and end in the same place.
There is much depth to Indian games and while we can play them merely as board games, digging deeper helps us understand more about us, our lives, our thinking and basic thought processes that perhaps influenced those who created the games. When it comes to games of strategy moves are, by and large, fairly simple. Across games, you find there are usually just two moves. Game pieces move one step at a time, or sometimes jump over another game piece.
Again, to me. It’s the philosophy of taking one day at a time, one obstacle at a time, as it were, rather than thinking or moving too far ahead before we understand the result of a single move.
While most of us are familiar with Parama Padam (the traditional Snakes and Ladders) or and Dhayakattam (Chaupad, there is a modern-day Ludo), our country has a wide variety of games that we have almost forgotten. In recreating them from the cobwebs of our mind, we will discover not just more about our history and culture and about life itself. After all there are so many lessons in merely the movement of game pieces on a traditional gameboard.