In living rooms, cafés, and weekend get-togethers, card games are quietly reshaping the social landscape in India. This past year has seen an influx of new designs — some built to test knowledge, others to fuel laughter or spark debate. From fitness challenges to fun drinking games, these decks have found a place in conversations and celebrations alike, reflecting a shift toward playful, interactive experiences. Card games are evolving into cultural snapshots, capturing the mood and humour of modern India.
At first glance, a fitness community creating a card game might seem like an unlikely pairing, but for The Quad, a Chennai based fitness community it was a natural extension of their shared goals. What began as a simple idea to make workouts more engaging soon evolved into a deck that encouraged movement, competition and camaraderie.
“Fitness and exercise is a process. It requires intent and structure to bring movement into people’s lives. So much natural movement has been removed from our lives, and we wanted to find a way to bring that back,” says Ranjani Shanker, head of marketing at The Quad, which launched the card game Move It! (₹399 on shop.thequad.in) In November last year.
Move It!
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“Move It! is a game that involves deduction skills and memory. If you have played Chinese Whispers and The New York Times Wordle, it is a combination of them, but with movement,” she says, adding that it took approximately six months to make the card game from conceptualisation to production. “We decided to go with a physical card game because we already have online courses that people subscribe to, and a card game seemed like a more tangible and fun way to bring people together,” she adds.
According to Statista, a German online platform that specialises in data gathering and visualisation, table-top games or board games will experience an annual growth rate of 5.38% between 2024 and 2029 in India. This growth rate is being credited to the surge in the popularity of cards, with growing number of local designers creating innovative and culturally relevant games.
Proving this statistic right are Gurugram-based independent creators of card game Angry Indians (₹599 on amazon.in), which is a satirical game based on strategy for “open-minded desi nerds”. Abhishek Sheel and Rhiju Talukdar, the co-creators of the game came up with the idea during peak covid lockdown. “We thought, why not make a card game because with table-top games, you have the freedom of making something as complex or as simple as you want and there’s an audience for both,” says Rhiju.
“The concept of the game came from pent-up political angst, but we couldn’t be too loud or radical. We also did not know the mechanics of making a game, so we wanted to keep it light-hearted and doodley,” he says. They knew for sure that the mechanics had to involve attack and defend actions because the game is a satire on Indian pop-culture and modern way of life, which invariably includes a ton of friction, adds Rhiju.
The Angry Indians card game being played
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Rhiju says there was a lot of math involved: “I ended up re-learning probability related concepts I learnt in school to figure out the chances of winning and losing.” A single gameplay of Angry Indians can go on 10 minutes to 45 minutes and the playability is endless. “There are a number of strategies so you can keep playing in different ways. We sometimes get emails asking us if we can make certain moves that we hadn’t thought about ourselves,” says Abhishek, adding that there was a personal learning curve.
Then there is The Ultimate Indian Drinking Game (₹999 on amazon.in) by New Delhi-based party game makers Dring. “For us extroverted people, the covid lockdown was a difficult time. My best friend from college and I invited some people over and played a drinking game that was made in the U.S. While it was a lot of fun, we realised that there were a lot of cultural differences so it was evident that it was not made for us,” says Kanishk Singhal, co-founder of Dring.
The 55 deck of cards, launched in November 2020, needs three or more players with no upper limit. Each player takes turns drawing from a deck of cards and follows instruction written on it. If they fail, they need to drink. Cards come with instructions or ‘dares’ like — “balance a drink on your head and walk from one side of the room to the other. If you fail, take three sips” or “Send the 7th picture in your gallery to the 4th chat on your Whatsapp, or take five sips.”
“After we marketed the game with a small video, we sold out of our entire stock of 400 boxes in three days. This made us realise that there is a market. India wants to play these games, but there is a gap,” he says. Dring currently has a catalogue of over ten different games with themes ranging from dating, Bollywood to women only, all catered to young adults.
“Now that the Indian designers and producers have started making games with these shared experiences, they are doing a much better job,” says Varun Devanathan, founder of The Board Room, a chain of table-top gaming cafes in Chennai. He adds, “We have access to a larger pool of players, so a lot of new designers take our help to test their games and players have been responding very well to Indian games,” he says, adding that a particularly interesting game is Chappal vs Cockroach (₹999 on amazon.in) by Bengaluru-based startup Nightingame. The rules of the game are simple — the player who hits a cockroach card fastest with a chappal card from their hand wins!
People playing board games
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VELANKANNI RAJ B
The rise in popularity of card games has many catalysts according to Phalgun Polepalli, the founder of Mozaic Games, a Bengaluru-based game-maker. “Card games are affordable and portable, and they are designed to accommodate many players, unlike most board games that max out at four players,” he says. “The Indian market is unique in this sense because while the rest of the world is looking at single-player games, we want games that include bigger and bigger groups.”
He adds, “These are designed for quick-play and the rules are simpler to hold attention” he says, adding that manufacturing card games is easier than manufacturing board games. “Card games are cost-effective because the investment is less. While it might take ₹3-4 lakh to manufacture one batch of board games, it takes only ₹1-1.5 lakh to make a card game,” he says. Board games have multiple pieces and elements which makes production a more complicated process and card games eliminate that complication.
There are over 1,000 designers and table-top game makers in India currently. “We have barely scratched the surface. The numbers might look large, but the percentage of people who play these games is still in the single digits,” states Varun, adding “In the next few years we are going to see a big rise in makers and players.”
Published – March 17, 2025 12:56 pm IST
