What if you could run a political party, pick your candidates, manage your vote bank, and launch attacks on rivals all before dinner? That is the idea behind Election Tamasha, a new satirical strategy board game created by Ajay Ambekar. He is a former journalist and Public Relations Officer to a Maharashtra Chief Minister, who spent decades around the machinery of Indian politics. The game puts players in the shoes of a party’s “high command” and asks them to do what political strategists do: calculate, campaign, form alliances, and hope everything doesn’t fall apart before the results.

The idea, however, came to Ambekar only after retirement. While visiting his daughter in the US, he discovered the world of board games and began wondering why Indian elections had not made their way onto the tabletop. “I did not know much about board games. So I thought, why should we not create a board game for the election?” he recalls.