The last week has been too hectic for R.Santhanakrishnan and Preetha Raghavan, a Chennai-based couple, who have come up with a Tamil counterpart of the popular board game Scrabble called ‘ Sorkalam ’. The game was recently made available for sale and the couple have been receiving several orders for it from across the country.
“We hit upon the idea for a word game in Tamil around four years ago when we sat down to play Scrabble with our daughter. Preetha and I realised that it wouldn’t be possible to simply replicate everything from the English version of the game as that would be too unwieldy,” said Mr. Santhanakrishnan, who works as a consultant in data analytics and artificial intelligence.
His experience with text analytics proved to be a big boon for them and they soon began to use these techniques to explore and study the structure of the language and how they would need to incorporate it into the game.
“We came up with a pen-and-paper prototype of the game where we cut small squares out of cardboard and wrote the letters on them to be used as tiles. This helped us immensely in getting the combination of the Uyir-mei ezuthu which we finally zeroed in on to be a part of the game,” said Ms Preetha, an entrepreneur. As a part of this process, the couple roped in several other board game connoisseurs they connected with through Twitter, to play the game using their prototype and incorporated their feedback.
The version of the game which is now on sale has a 17x17 board, 90 wooden tiles with Tamil letters, 55 symbol tiles and 20 blank tiles. “The board we decided on is bigger than the one used for Scrabble since the Tamil letters are wider and we needed an optimal grid size. The blank letters can be used as any letter on the board and we’ve ensured that the players can write on them with a sketch pen during the game which can then be wiped off,” they said.
Mr. Santhanakrishnan said that over the last few years, places in the city for people to meet up and play board games have opened up. “This was extremely promising for us and we realised that there are several people who are still interested in playing board games.”
Over the last few months, there has also been a revival of interest in board games in households due to the lockdown. “We’re also immensely excited about the fact that children will sit with their grandparents and play Sorkalam. It definitely will also contribute to improving their language skills,” Ms Preetha said.
