This is a game changer

Open your own chai stall, build the Taj Mahal and escape reality for a bit with these 10 new Indian board games

- Taranna Khetpal

Every Indian has, at some point, contemplated the economics of running a chai tapri.

This game turns that universal daydream into a test of strategy and timing. You run a stall at a mela, juggling tea leaves, milk, sugar and spices, while managing burners, saucepans and impatient customers. Celebs drop by, critics complicate things. Can you rise above it all to become the ultimate ‘Chaiwalla’ or will you give up your tapri dreams forever?

The game comes with 200 trivia cards, each with an iconic dialogue, earworm lyrics or visual clues. Your job is to guess the movie. There’s a picture of a throat labelled ‘epiglottis’. Bollywood die-hards, you know the answer: My Name Is Khan. And the dialogue “Bachpan se mujhe shaadi karne ka bohot shauk hai, by God”? That's Geet from Jab We Met, obviously. The game gives you a chance to flex your filmi knowledge that’s otherwise completely useless.

The game is part Taboo, part charades. Players fling one-word clues from all sides, but if two people say the same thing (“egg” for “omelette”), it's cancelled. Which means you're suddenly reaching for weirder, more desperate prompts, such as “bread”, “hard-boiled”, even a random “Teja”. It gets worse if you switch to the Secret Roles mode, where players are split into Nice and Naughty, with some helping you and others sabotaging you. The goal is to land the word before logic taps out completely.