The Mumbai Connection board, a map of the Mumbai local train network laid out for play

Gaming unplugged

Mumbai Connection

The world's most complicated train network, flattened onto a board.

No batteries required. You don't need to charge anything or use any screens. Two to four people, a big table and about an hour and a half is all you need to play. A smart eight year old manages the rules, so do his grandparents. What changes is how ruthless everyone gets within 15 minutes.

₹4,500, shipped anywhere in India

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Boxes ship from my home in Bangalore.

The governor has a budget

Mumbai held an election and almost everyone voted. A good person won, became governor, and decided the local trains should be better than they already are. He has a budget for it. You run one of the companies hired to do the work.

You lay track between two adjacent stations by paying in cards of the matching colour and number, and the bank pays you for every stretch you finish. Longer stretches pay better. Once a stretch is built, other players may not build over it, so the tension rises as the map fills up.

You also carry route orders, kept secret until the end. Each one names two stations. Connect them before the end of the game and the bank pays out. Fail to connect them and you pay the bank instead, which is where most games are decided.

Your starting hand decides your opening and very little after that. There is enough luck in the deck that nobody can call the winner early, and not so much that the better player loses.

Events, challenges and characters add to the mayhem.

The Mumbai Connection components laid out on a wooden table: the board, cards, wooden track markers and money

What's in the box

The full count, since the box never tells you until you open it. 123 track cards in nine colours, plus 15 rainbow cards that count as any colour. 90 route orders, 7 express and 83 local. 13 event cards. 8 character cards. 80 wooden track markers, 20 each in four colours, and 16 more for the challenges. Money in ones, twos, fives, tens, twenties and fifties. Six loan cards, for when it goes badly.

All of it sits in a moulded tray. Setting up takes about five minutes, and packing away takes about the same.

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Turn the board over

Flip the board and the tracks are gone. The back is a love letter to Mumbai, printed at full size, on every board. Recipes you could actually cook from, city history, sketches of the places you already have photographs of.

Nobody needs this to play the game. It went on anyway.

Three years and a lot of friends

There is nothing in the box I did not work on. There is also nothing in the box that one person could have made. We did it in our spare time, in between teaching courses, doing seva, and travelling all over the world, over three years, and loved every moment of it.