Chairman of the Board?

Indian-origin designer behind 'greatest board game in the world'
Sometime in December 2010, Puerto Rico, a game that had been the top rated game on BoardGameGeek.com for seven years, slipped to second place.Its position as the greatest board game in the world was taken up by Twilight Struggle, which has held that position ever since.
Twilight Struggle was designed by Ananda Gupta, a first-generation American who has roots in Calcutta though he's only visited twice."My grandparents had an apartment on Ballygunge Circle which I remember quite clearly," he says. After studying economics and philosophy at Tufts University in Boston, he decided to go into public policy as a career.
Gupta started gaming early. "I had been playing tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Marvel Super Heroes, Call of Cthulhu and so on since I was 7 or 8. My first real board game experience was Diplomacy, the 7-player game of pre-WWI politics and intrigue. It's still a classic, but it takes a long time so I rarely play these days," he says.
Twilight Struggle isn't about sparkly vampires and buff werewolves. The game takes its title from John F Kennedy's inaugural address, describing the Cold War. It's meant for two players, one representing the US, the other, the Soviet Union. Cards representing events are dealt out. Each card also contains operations points, which can be deployed to increase or decrease the country's influence around the world. As the game goes on, each player will gain victory points. The game ends when one player scores 20 victory points or when the world becomes so unstable that nuclear war takes place. There are other criteria, but suffice to say that the game can get very intense.
Gupta had always been a fan of historical board games, but found them increasingly time-consuming. "With full-time and families, we just didn't have the time to play the same games we played in college," he says.
What Gupta wanted to do was to build an uncomplicated game, but one that would still offer a lot of room for skill and luck. "We wanted to create a game where the core rules remained extremely simple, and the complexity came entirely from the interactions of the cards, the players' secret knowledge of their hands, and the board position," he says.
"As a teenager I was most interested in modern military history. Right now, I am especially interested in the history of the Industrial Revolution and of business & commerce. In terms of Indian history I have been most interested in two periods: the Mughal era, particularly the rule of Akbar, and the Raj." he says.
It's the experience that makes board games appealing in the videogame era. "I think people find the face-to-face social interaction of board games appealing. There's no electronic equivalent of sitting at a table with family or friends and playing a game with physical components. Video games can create great social experiences, of course, but board games are more familiar and intimate," he says.
But Twilight Struggle will be a videogame itself, and soon. A very successful Kickstarter campaign (raising $391,047 against an initial target of $50,000) will see the game make the transition from board to screen early this year.
As for Gupta, he and his Twilight collaborator Jason Matthews are now working on Imperial Struggle ­ and this time, the powers in conflict are 18th century Britain and France. "The two great powers compete for glory in colonies around the world (especially India!), and for scientific, military, and cultural advantage. It's a challenging design; it represents more than twice the time period of Twilight Struggle and contains four major wars that directly involve the two great powers," he says.