Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 13

There are two reasons why this venerable strategy game leapfrogs those other most austere of board games, chess and draughts, into our list. First, its sheer perverseness. There it was–the backgammon board–always hiding on the other side of the travel draughts, stubbornly resisting comprehension. Not for backgammon the patchwork of squares. Oh no! This thing needed a whole new board with ‘quadrants’ and a ‘bar’ and everything.

Second, the whiff of maturity, the wisdom of ages. Backgammon carried the weight of millennia and, though we didn’t know it at the time, we could sense it. The ancient Egyptians, the Byzantine emperors of Mesopotamia and now us–the great unwashed of suburbia–all staring at the pointy triangle things. At the very least, it proffered a vacant seat at the big table–a proper conversation between adult and child as the rules were explained.

Yet also it was accessible, but not too indiscriminate. Unlike the untouchable ivory chess set in your best mate’s dad’s study, you could get your hands dirty with the backgammon counters. Those green, snot-sleeved draughts players with their petulant ‘crown me!’s kept their distance. Backgammon had a vocabulary of its own: bearing off, kibitzers, the gin position, double bumps and mandatory beavers…Hang on: maybe they were just making this up as they went along after all.

See also Othello, Connect Four, Yahtzee

Oh, and we lied up there. There was a third reason why we wanted a backgammon of our own: the huge surge in popularity it underwent in the 1970s. Rather like snooker in the ’80s and football in the ’90s, backgammon suddenly became trendy. Leading players jetted from tournament to tournament, wrote bestselling books (about backgammon, obviously) and made the front pages in ‘my hotel sex-romp roast hell’ tabloid headlines.¹

However, we come not to damn the game but to praise its Cream-era maker. Before Paul Heaton and his mates were a twinkle in a skiffle-humming Hull milkman’s eye, the name ‘House Martin’ was already a stamp of quality thanks to the Hackney-based games factory. Specialising in no-nonsense, phlegmatic renderings of popular post-war games, House Martin unashamedly embossed every box with the legend ‘Made in England’. No wonder they went under.

1 One of Graham Greene’s last novels, The Captain and the Enemy, is about a boy who is won from his father by a con man in a game of backgammon. Possibly one to omit from the bedtime story selection for the little ones, there.