Published: 8 May 2026 | Author: Team JanVayu | Reading time: 6 min
JanVayu now has a Learning Games panel with six short, original games, meant for classrooms, RWA meetings, family evenings and ten idle minutes on a phone. Open it at janvayu.in/#games or from the Action menu under Learning Games.
Why games
Talk about air quality in India tends to take two forms. One is the dry data dashboard, which we also run. The other is the outrage when AQI passes 400 in November, which we also track. What is missing is a calm way to learn how all this works. Games help because being wrong costs little, people play again, and a round fits between two metro stations.
The Jeopardy format comes from Dr. Sarath Guttikunda of UrbanEmissions.info, who runs air-quality teaching work for which a Jeopardy-style quiz suits well. We thought the format belonged on JanVayu too. We have not asked Dr. Guttikunda to endorse this version, and we have not sourced a description of his own sessions here. The clues, the categories and the Indian framing are ours. If you want the live version, with audience teams and a buzzer, request a session on the Workshops panel.
The newest game is older still. Moksha Patam is the original Indian Snakes & Ladders, which travelled abroad and became "Chutes and Ladders". We gave it a clean-air theme.
The six games
1. Air Quality Jeopardy (India edition)
There are 25 tiles in five categories (Sources, Health, Policy, Cities, Action), each worth ₹1,000 to ₹5,000. Clicking a tile shows a statement, and you work out the question it answers. For example, the tile says "This Indian city was named the most polluted capital in the world in IQAir 2025", and the matching question is "What is New Delhi?"
Click Reveal answer to see the question form and a paragraph of explanation drawn from CEEW 2024, IIT-Delhi DSS, NCAP records, IQAir 2025 and the Lancet Countdown 2025. Mark whether you got it, and you earn the tile's value. Clearing all 25 tiles tops out at ₹75,000. Your score is saved on your device only, and we do not log results.
2. PM Quick-Quiz
Ten multiple-choice questions take about 3 minutes. Each answer comes with a short note on why the right option is right and why the others are wrong. The questions start with basics such as what PM2.5 means. They go on to numbers worth knowing (the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³, and about 1.7 million Indian PM2.5 deaths a year per the Lancet Countdown 2025), then policy (NCAP, GRAP stage thresholds), and then surprises such as Berkeley Earth's finding that 22 µg/m³ is about one cigarette a day.
3. Source Matcher
Seven main sources of Indian PM2.5 are listed: stubble, residential biomass, coal thermal plants, road dust and non-exhaust emissions, brick kilns, diesel generators and open waste burning. Each has a one-sentence description with a fact many readers will not know. Zigzag brick kilns, for instance, can cut particulate matter by up to about half, according to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Tap a source, then tap its description. Matching all seven takes about five minutes from a cold start.
4. Clean Air Snakes & Ladders (Moksha Patam edition)
The 6×6 board has 36 squares on a classic zigzag path. Press Roll dice to move 1 to 6 squares.
A ladder is a citizen action that moves you up. Switching from a chulha to LPG takes you from square 3 to 11, filing an RTI on NCAP fund use from 14 to 24, and commenting on your city's draft Action Plan from 21 to 30. A snake is a pollution event or policy failure that moves you down. Diwali fireworks send you from 10 to 2, a missed FGD deadline from 18 to 6, the stubble-burning peak from 25 to 13, and GRAP-IV being triggered from 32 to 19.
Each special square shows a one-line fact. The goal is square 36, "India meets the WHO 5 µg/m³ guideline", and fewer rolls is better. The board makes two points. Clean air is built from many small actions by citizens. And single events such as fireworks, missed deadlines and burning seasons can wipe out a lot of that gain at once.
5. Jodi Match
Twelve cards make six pairs (jodis). Tap two, and if they match, both stay face-up and you score the pair. If not, both flip back. The aim is to clear all six pairs in as few moves as possible, and a perfect run is six moves.
The pairs are associations that anyone discussing air quality should know: PM2.5 and chulha smoke, NCAP and National Clean Air Programme, GRAP-IV and AQI above 450, CAQM and the NCR statutory air-quality body (2021 Act), WHO PM2.5 and the 5 µg/m³ annual guideline, and N95 and at least 95% PM2.5 filtration when fitted. After two or three rounds they stick. The rules are those of the memory-card game many of us grew up with, called Pelmanism, or "Concentration" abroad. We put pollutants on the cards.
6. Air Tambola
This is the most Indian game on the panel. A standard tambola ticket has 3 rows and 9 columns with five filled cells per row. Ours holds 15 air-quality terms drawn from a pool of 27, in place of numbers from 1 to 90. The pool includes PM2.5, GRAP-IV, NCAP, CAAQMS, Loni, Stubble, FGD, N95, HEPA, BS-VI, AQLI, Lancet 1.72M, RTI, Black Carbon and Brick Kiln.
Press Call next and a one-line clue is read out. An example is "India's continuous air quality monitoring station network, six-letter acronym." If the answer is on your ticket, tap it to mark it. The game detects the four usual housie wins: Top Line (all five cells in row 1), Middle Line (row 2), Bottom Line (row 3) and Full House (every cell on the ticket).
A game finishes within 27 calls, and sooner if you mark quickly. We chose tambola because the call-and-mark rhythm is familiar to anyone who has spent a long train journey or a wedding pre-function in India. The moment a player thinks "I am playing housie with pollution terms" is when air quality starts to feel like an ordinary subject.
What we may add
Write to contribute@janvayu.in if you want to weigh in or want any of these sooner:
- A Hindi translation of all six games (seven now, since Vayu Junction went live on 20 May 2026), then Tamil, Bengali and Marathi.
- A printable pack for teachers, with questions, answer key, projector slides, a Snakes & Ladders board and tambola tickets, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- A monthly rotating clue set on the Jeopardy board, so regular players see new clues.
- A Moksha Patam variant with snakes and ladders for Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru, tied to each city's live AQI.
- An Antakshari-style word chain in which each air-quality term must start with the last letter of the one before.
- A multiplayer tambola session hosted by the JanVayu team on a Sunday evening, with a real prize for the first Full House.
If you run a school, an RWA or a newsroom, write in. The code is MIT-licensed and the content is CC BY-NC-SA, so you are free to copy and adapt it.
How reliable the answers are
Each answer has an explanation. We are still adding a primary source to every clue, and some do not have one yet. Where a clue rests on a single estimate, we name it, as with the all-cause mortality coefficient of 8.6% per 10 µg/m³ (95% CI 6.4 to 10.8, Jaganathan et al. 2024). Tell us what could be sharper.
Play now: janvayu.in/#games Want a live version led by a host? Book a workshop.