Designer Diary: Chai Garam

While India slept through the boardgaming wave that swept across many parts of the world in the early 21st century, recently that wave has started to gain traction.

Back in 2019, I had conversations about publishing a certain elaborate board game called "Malabar" with Phalgun Polepalli, the wizard behind DICE TOY LABS. Post-work hours during weekends, I devoted my time to game development and playtests, but the progress was very slow. Around that time, Phalgun launched a print-and-play (PnP) Indian board game resource along with a couple of others in the industry. I must have been sipping chai while checking it out — and that's when the initial idea of Chai Garam was incepted.

Chai (or tea), among other things, is essential to regular Indians and is almost an inseparable part of our lives. Looking at this opportunity to make a PnP game that people could easily download, I quickly thought of a simple game in which players draft ingredients, cook different types of chai, and serve them to customers who are asking for specific orders.

The game would play in three phases: pick ingredients, make tea, and sell tea. In each round, players would draft from a hand of seven ingredient cards, then make tea simultaneously in their saucepan cards based on certain restrictions for recipes, then fulfill a row of order cards arranged during the set-up. This happened for five rounds, then everybody calculated how much they earned from all those orders. The richest player won the game! Sweet and simple.

How the prototype components transformed into their final forms!

Phalgun, however, saw a lot of potential in this game idea, and we got to talking about how to make this a full-blown game — and that's when the actual game development journey began for Chai Garam. A new market mechanism replaced the drafting mechanism, with players now buying a set of ingredients by paying money, like in reality. The game now included a wider variety of customers, a set of potentially high-earning cards called events, and personal objectives for players to achieve to earn even more money. The stove fire card was removed since it felt like a bummer during playtests, and the number of teapots reduced from five to three.

The game started drawing more similarities to real life to match my inclination towards a strong thematic integration. Early on my vision for Chai Garam was simple: how to tell the unassuming and earthly story of an Indian tea seller through the course of events during a regular day at his business. Sticking to the theme helped me a lot to brainstorm when in doubt and led us to develop mechanisms that mimic the simulation of being a tea seller, commonly called "chai waala" in Hindi. The challenge was to marry the theme and mechanisms in an intuitive way to make it interesting and engaging enough for the common Indian to grasp.

Different types of order cards from the modified Chai Garam

Even at this point, both Phalgun and I were not sure what the final game would be like, but by this time we had shared a lot of notes and ideas, and it was surely happening! On the design front, playtests increased steadily, and a few of the game ideas — the stove fire, a recipe book (with all sorts of tea you can make), the ability to cook non-standard items (like lemonade, Kashmiri kahwa, etc.) — did a back and forth before we eventually bid all of these things farewell from Chai Garam as it started becoming more and more streamlined.

At this point, we hired an artist for this design — Aditi Desai, who's a close friend of me and my wife — and all my prototype components started to get life. I'd always wanted to give an Indian feel to the game, and this was Aditi's superpower. She brought the entire concept and idea of a tea stall to life with her vibrant art. The Chai Garam box cover was made, and it started getting buzz. I was also sort of involved in the art direction of the game, translating the dream Phalgun had for it to the artist, and it was a long, but fun process. It was like creating our own chai-verse as there were so many characters and ingredients in the game!

A late-stage design note I shared with Phalgun – consolidating the mechanisms, most of which made it into Chai Garam

At this time, orders changed into customers, each with their own personality. They now started queuing up in rows of three in three columns and got pissed if customers behind them got their order first! Kettles were now saucepans, which more resembled the utensils used in actual tea stalls in India. A chai garam card was a special card introduced for players to take an additional action, and since the game was essentially a race, having an extra turn can really change the dynamics midgame.

I also wanted to introduce the world to various tea leaves that we grow in India, so we have four varieties of tea leaves that players can shop for in the market: Darjeeling, Assam, Nilgiri, and Kashmiri. With such a variety of tea leaves and additives, the permutations of the different flavors and recipes of tea possible in the game was exponential! Which gave rise to the vast heterogeneity among customer cards. The game ended when all customer cards were done for the day!

The second wave of the pandemic hit deep in early 2021, and the overall progress slowed for a while, but I kept working on the balance and theme integration whenever I had time. During this period, some major developments and changes were brought to the game: goals, star ratings, and tea stall (Tapri), among other things. We discussed how to potentially include these in the game, while also keeping in mind the simplicity in terminologies and steps that any person can understand. Players now didn't just prepare chai in the air, but each of them got a sort of player board where they heat their saucepans to cook chai, call customers to their own tea stall, and unlock upgrades that will help them play faster and be more cost efficient.

Public and personal goals were a way players could receive "star" ratings, which was an important parameter now in the endgame scoring. Chai Garam was a game about maximizing the potential of your chai: How much money can you make serving tea to a variety of customers in the most efficient way possible? There were multiple paths of doing this in the game, whether focusing on one type of tea, investing in bigger saucepans, unlocking economic upgrades like free water/milk early on in the game, or just being consistent in serving — and when players tried exploring these aspects, they kept asking to play more! Now players were racing to achieve five stars since that got them the majority of points, and they had enough agency to balance money as well as stars: What was the right mix for a winning strategy? These were the puzzles we wanted players to figure out and enjoy optimizing when playing Chai Garam.

I wrapped up final playtests with all of these new moving parts and fine-tuned these to fit well with each other. For example, snacks were always a good thing to have with chai, so each snack had a different power from the other, and players could implement those in their play styles. While bun maska (being everybody's favorite) allowed players to serve any chai to any customer, biscuits let players collect an extra rupee per cup they sold. Goal cards were more standardized to fit all player counts. At the same time, I created a final prototype for the final version of the game, and we started working on the final rules draft.

How the prototype components transformed into their final forms!

When we got the whole game together with the final artwork and components, the overall experience was extremely immersive. The art called for nostalgia and created an instant connection. The thematic integration was a very strong factor for people to grasp the seemingly intricate rules; after all, it's just your regular cup of tea!

The game was finally brought to life in September 2021 when it opened up for pre-orders, and there has been no looking back since! I want to sincerely thank DICE TOY LABS for giving me the opportunity to be able to create a game, and the trust will help me continue the pursuit of making good games for everyone to play.

Sidhant Chand