On a sunny weekday afternoon, Zain Memon walks into Jamjar Diner, a bohemian café in Versova, that haven of aspiring movie stars and indie filmmakers. Memon is a ludologist and a media producer who, along with Ship of Theseus filmmaker Anand Gandhi, has co-founded Memesys Culture Lab. Memesys is a cinema and new media studio that works at the intersection of science, philosophy, and culture. Memon is also the creator of Shasn, a new political strategy board game that’s already being compared with Twilight Struggle, the Cold War strategy game that critics rank as the greatest game ever to be made. When it launched on Kickstarter, it crossed its funding target under 22 hours. Today, Memon’s got his team to play the game with me.

You may not be feeling it in India, but we are living in the golden age of board games. Between 2013 and 2016, worldwide board game sales went up from $100 million to $305 million. According to one estimate, the global board games market size is expected to reach over $12 billion by 2023 alone. In comparison, India is still far behind. Industry data suggests that the table-top game market contributes to just 10 per cent of the retail toy market, that stands at $400 million. But even within that sizeable market of $40 million, Indian game creators and publishers are far and few. Board game cafes are stacked primarily with western games and with just one Indian political strategy game, The Poll, retailing in the market right now, you can’t exactly describe the Indian board games industry as mushrooming right now. Hell, you probably can’t even call it an industry.

In this almost barren landscape, Shasn stands out with its sharp design, elaborate gameplay, multiple universes – India, US, Ancient Rome, and the future – and relevant policy questions that sit at the heart of the game. We’re playing in the Indian universe where I am supposed to gain maximum votes by answering the policy questions shrewdly. The range of questions is wide – Would you send aid to Pakistan in time of need? Would you build a mall at the expense of heritage conservation? Should Indian epics be introduced in the school syllabus? – and extremely real and relatable. The only difference is that when you’re playing the game you’re not thinking as a citizen who is affected by these policies, but as a politician whose sole purpose is to gain power and win. And even as you expand your scope of influence on the board, you must also simultaneously reduce that of your opponents. The game can be played between 2-4 players.

For most part, board games are based on three elements – dexterity, strategy, and luck. It’s the last element that causes the most frustration – when the dice doesn’t roll your way or you get dealt a bad hand. Shasn has reduced the element of luck to the bare minimum. So, really, it comes down to how well you strategize and, because in Shasn your victory is tied into your opponent’s defeat, the question is to what lengths you will go to win.

Numerous studies have shown that the human brain is incapable of being able to separate a game from reality. Merely thinking of an imagined situation activates the same brain regions as the actual experience. So, if you had to pay a fine of ₹5,000 in a round of Monopoly, you will likely experience the same feeling of loss and frustration that you would if you were paying it in real life. Which is why board games oftentimes tend to bring out the worst in us. By adding the elements of ideology and power, Shasn makes this sense of loss very, very personal.

Think back to every single time you’ve clashed with your friends on social media or in a WhatsApp group over something a politician has said or done and the hours you’ve spent battling it out, even though the rest of the group keeps reminding the two of you that there’s no point in losing friends over politics. Think of the anger and frustration you’ve felt or the joy when you’ve proven your point and put down your opponent in full public view. Now, put that in a board game. That, my friend, is Shasn.

There’s almost no way to play and win at Shasn as an idealist, because, at some point you will have to play the capitalist card or, in your answers to policy issues, support a group or ideology that you vehemently oppose. Even when you win the majority in a constituency, you have to fight tooth and nail to keep the others out. It comes as no surprise that the roots of Shasn are in the making of An Insignificant Man, the documentary on the rise of Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party. It is, as Memon says, three years of research condensed into a two-hour game.

Over the two days that I played the game and watched others play, no one every completed Shasn in two hours. Because every answer to a policy question would start a debate and while at the end of every debate, someone in the group would remind everyone that it was just a game, somewhere deep down no one really believed it. And so, the cycle would repeat. Almost everyone playing the game were strangers to each other, so there was an amount of civility, but there were eyerolls when someone espoused an ideology different from their own. At least one of the players confessed that she’d have definitely got into a fight with her opponent if she were playing him online because it’s easier to do that with someone anonymous. Another one insisted on justifying every time she’d pick an answer that went against her personal ideology.

And that’s just the thing. As humans, we are wired to seek approval (some more than others); how people perceive us is important to us. It’s what prevents most of us from asking questions or making flippant statements at a packed seminar in fear of being perceived as being stupid. It’s also what encourages us to coherently make that one point we feel strongly about. As against on social media or in WhatsApp groups where it’s a free for all because everyone’s anonymous. Shasn is like that guy who invited his Twitter followers from both ends of the ideological spectrum to his home for a meal. It’s a game that’s attempting to bring in nuance to the political debate. It’s a long road, yes, but it’s a step.

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