Caress: A Confession and a Game
The hardest part of chess, they don’t tell you, is finding the second player.
In Dewas, this was a genuine supply-chain problem. Cricket players were available in bulk. Carrom players could be summoned by the sound of a striker hitting the frame. But chess players existed in the census the way tigers do — officially present, rarely sighted. Vishwanathan Anand never had this problem. He had all of Chennai. I had one brother, and he had conditions.
The condition was that the game should involve some physical skill. Thinking quietly for forty minutes was, in his legal opinion, not a game but a punishment.
So we invented one. We set up the chess board, and instead of moving the pieces, we flicked them. Carrom rules applied to chess pieces. Your knight didn’t develop to f3; it was launched in the general direction of f3 and settled wherever physics and floor dust permitted. Captures happened the honest way — by collision. We called it nothing at the time. Naming things is what adults do to feel productive.
The strange part is that it worked. Boys who wouldn’t sit through one game of actual chess queued up for this. The queen, it turns out, is far more popular as a projectile than as a strategist. I was never bored again, which for a bespectacled boy in 1990s Dewas is roughly equivalent to enlightenment.
Three decades later, I have done what any reasonable man would do with a childhood memory: I turned it into a website.
The game is called Caress — carrom plus chess. Yes, we named a game about violently flicking wooden pieces at each other after the gentlest verb in the English language. The pieces have filed no complaints so far. You can play it here:
No app, no login, no newsletter popup asking for your email like an insecure lover. Just the game my brother and I played on the floor, now playable without the floor.
Go flick a bishop. Report back.
PS: My brother has played it and pointed out that my flicking has deteriorated. Some supply-chain problems, it seems, follow you into your forties.
