A design project in progress — June 2026
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The Mahabharata is not a story about a war.
It is a story about what happens when a civilisation has to choose between what it wants and what is right — and chooses wrong, again and again, until the war becomes inevitable. It has 100,000 verses. It contains the Bhagavad Gita. It has characters so complex that scholars spend careers inside a single figure.
And yet most children in India today know it only from television.
I have been thinking for a while about what it would mean to bring this epic into the hands of the next generation in a format they would actually reach for. Not a textbook. Not a quiz app. Something they would happy to open, play & interact.
The answer I kept coming back to was: a football trading card game. Seeing the engagement with trading game framework.
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WHAT PANINI FIGURED OUT AND WHAT THE MAHABHARATA ALREADY HAS
When Panini designs a football card set, they are doing something very specific. They are taking a footballer — a real person with a history and a position and a way of playing — and distilling them into a visual object that a child can hold, compare, trade, and feel proud to own.
The statistics are not decoration. They are the beginning of understanding. A child who studies a card learns, without being taught, that a striker’s value is different from a goalkeeper’s. That two players with similar scores can have completely different roles. That context changes everything.
The Mahabharata already has all of this.
It has characters with distinct roles — the archer, the mace fighter, the strategist, the diplomat, the sage. It has alliances and rivalries that create natural team structures. It has divine weapons that function exactly like equipment upgrades. It has a rarity hierarchy built directly into the text — the gods appear rarely, the great warriors more often, the ordinary soldiers everywhere.
The epic was, in some sense, already a trading card game. I am just making the cards physical.
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THE DESIGN
The project is called Dynasties of Kurukshetra.
It is a collectible physical trading card game in which characters from the Mahabharata are designed in the visual language of modern football cards — Panini Adrenalyn XL, Topps Chrome, Match Attax. High-action illustrations. Clear stat blocks. Faction crests. Holographic foil for the rare pulls.
The card set is built on a rarity pyramid with four tiers:
At the top, five Divine Avatar cards — Krishna in his Vishwaroopam form, Lord Shiva as Kirata the hunter, Goddess Durga, Parashurama, Vyasa the author-witness. Serial-numbered. Gold-leaf embossed. One guaranteed per sealed box.
Below them, thirty Astro-Warrior cards — the core heroes and villains. Arjuna. Karna. Bhishma. Draupadi. Duryodhana. Multiple versions of the most important figures, because Karna the King of Anga is a different character from Karna in his Kavacha armour. Holographic rainbow foil.
Then fifty-five Elite Commander cards — sub-commanders, divine weapons, sacred formations, summons. This is where the Gandiva Bow and the Sudarshana Chakra live as equippable weapon cards. Where the Chakravyuh is a strategy card that locks your opponent’s front line for two turns — and only a card with the Chakravyuh Entry trait can break it. Abhimanyu has it. He always will. His defence drops to forty as the trade-off.
And sixty Base Squad cards — the infantry, the regional forces, the minor kings, the event cards that carry the story’s texture. The Game of Dice. The House of Lac. The Exile.
One hundred and fifty cards in Set 1. Three hundred and fifty more over the following two years, as the story moves from the exile to the war to the aftermath.
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THE THING I KEEP THINKING ABOUT
Every card has a QR code on the back that links to a sixty-second narrated lore short — written as sports commentary. “Welcome back to the Kurukshetra Highlights. Today we are looking at Day 14, when Arjuna fulfilled his impossible vow before sunset…”
I keep thinking about the child who pulls an Ekalavya card — a character most children have never heard of — and scans the code and hears the story of the boy who taught himself archery before a clay statue and gave his thumb as guru’s fee to the teacher who had refused to teach him.
That story takes sixty seconds to tell. It stays for a lifetime.
The game teaches because the game is good. The lore accumulates because the cards are worth collecting. The children learn the Mahabharata because they are too busy trading cards to notice they are learning anything at all.
That is the design.
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WHERE THIS IS GOING
The project is currently in the planning phase — game design, card list, mechanic balancing, cultural review. The first production illustrations will be commissioned.
If you are a mythology scholar, a game designer, an illustrator working in this visual register, or simply someone who grew up with the Mahabharata and thinks this is long overdue — I would like to hear from you.
And if you are a child, or the parent of one, who might one day open a pack and pull a holographic Karna card with his Kavacha armour glowing gold-solar in the light — I am building this for you.
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More updates as the project develops.
– Sneha
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