Voyages

Let's start by traveling in someone else's memoirs, leading us to April 13, 1969:

On my sixth birthday I woke up to find the best present I have ever received. Next to my bed was an enormous globe – I had to rub my eyes to make sure it was real! I had always been fascinated by maps and geography, and my favourite childhood stories were those in which my father would recount the voyages of Marco Polo, Columbus and Magellan. It started with my father reading to me from Stefan Zweig’s Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan. Now our favourite game became tracing the journeys of these great explorers across the globe.

In How Life Imitates Chess (2007), published by William Heinemann.

And who reveals to us this dazzle by discoveries, by other worlds, by recreating adventures, by imagining and by playing, is the very one named Garry Kasparov, one of the best chess players of all time.

Having been born about a year and a half after Kasparov, also I remember a childhood globe in which the blue of the oceans predominated, and in which routes and dates of expeditions were marked. Across the seas and continents, discovering islands, traveling towards the poles with Scott and Amundsen, descending to the Mariana Trench or climbing the Himalayas.

I can’t help thinking on this rather curious proximity between Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan (then part of the Soviet Union), and Guimarães, Portugal, at the end of the 1960’s. As well as noting the shared fascination with maps and geography, games and chess.

Maps that have served me, so many times, as improvised game boards.

Lines and dots. Roads and towns. Roads of red, green or yellow color. Allowing for different displacements rates. Large, medium or small settlements, allowing to accommodate more or fewer parts, assigning bonuses or penalties, being the starting point or the arrival one.

Boards.
For races across geography.
For simple alignments.
For chasing.
For battles.

With labels, customizing pieces from other games. With dice, for movements or for deciding confrontations. And with notebooks, to annotate positions, army effectives, results and dates.

For voyages to the taste of imagination.