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The first time I came to Bengaluru at the age of six, I was mystified by the idea of a metro station being inside a mall — the Mantri Square Metro Station that connects directly to Orion Mall. Little did I know that fifteen years later, I’d be living just four stops away from there. I’ve grown to call this city something of a makeshift home, with its Iyengar bakeries and time-halting traffic. There’s something about Bangalore I can’t quite put my finger on, maybe it’s the way it nervously yet gracefully toes the line between nostalgia and modernity.
The other day, while mindlessly scrolling through Instagram as usual, I came across a creator, Aayush Mayank, who is developing an entire card game based on Namma Ooru Bengaluru, a love letter to this sprawling, enchanting, and sometimes exasperating city known for its potholes and its Bob’s Bar.
In a conversation with Homegrown, Mayank mentioned that he was originally inspired by Pokémon trading cards, of which he was a huge fan growing up. On a recent trip to Vietnam, he noticed many art stores collaborating with local artists, which sparked the idea to create a collectible card game based in Bangalore — with the ultimate vision of partnering with local stores across the city.
What Aayush built is deceptively simple in concept and painstaking in craft. “The game mechanics work in such a way that you need to build your own decks by collecting cards. Each card has an ability that interacts differently depending on the other cards in your deck. So in essence your deck reflects your personality!” The game is fast-paced, designed to be played quickly and spontaneously, perfect for picnics in the park or cafés.
Choosing to hand-draw over sixty cards instead of relying on AI-generated art did make the process painstaking in execution. For the game’s mechanics, he drew inspiration from Gwent (featured in The Witcher 3) and Magic: The Gathering, using their frameworks as a starting point. From there, he built his own system, experimenting with how each card’s abilities interacted and balanced with the others — a meticulous, often overwhelming process that required equal parts creativity and precision. According to Aayush, one of the hardest parts was playtesting which he did using Figma, to test the game with his friends. Speaking about the future of the game, Aayush says, “I want to partner with places that are into board games, art and culture to make a Bangalore based trading card game."
There’s a particular tenderness to turning a city into a deck of cards. Each card is a small map of memory — take the auto annas, or Bangalore's flooded roads (Aayush’s personal favourite) — the city comes alive in that deck. And collecting them becomes a way to collect the city itself. Bangalore is the city I became an adult in, a city whose corners I found myself taking buses, autos, and mostly on the backs of my college friends' bikes. I don't think I can quite put into words for this city means to me, but personally, I will eat up any sort of memorabilia of this place and everything it is, especially my three favourite things — the weather, the food, and the people.
You can follow Aayush's journey on his Instagram here.
