Miguel Martins knows cork the way other men know their own handwriting. Every summer he leads the harvest crews through the oak country around Évora, judging which trees are ready for a bark that comes back only once in nine years, on trees his grandfather stripped before him. Everything else he does follows from that material, including Martins Backgammon.
Why cork
Martins Cork Ltd. makes backgammon boards with cork playing surfaces, and to Martins it is simply another good use for something he has spent his life understanding. Cork is light, warm to the touch and almost silent under the dice. It grips a checker without holding it, shrugs off a spilled drink and does not warp in a damp room. Cork boards had their great decade in the seventies, when they were in every café and on every holiday table, and they never quite went away in the places where people actually play. Martins boards still find their way all over the world.
The Porto line
The Porto line is the house standard: a natural cork field set in a hard-wearing case, in ten solid colours from Army and Chocolate to Copper, Turquoise and Yellow. Nothing about it is precious. Everything about it is built to last.
A lifetime guarantee
That is the whole point of a Martins. These boards are made to be used hard, every evening, by players who slam their checkers and lean on the case. A Martins board will take thirty years of that and still play the same. Martins is so sure of it that every board carries a lifetime guarantee, something no other maker in the trade has dared to offer. He considers this less a promise than a statement of fact, and he has not yet been asked to prove it.
An honest price
The price is the other half of the story. A Martins is honest, rock-solid and sold at a price that makes the competition uncomfortable. It is the board for players who would rather spend their money on the evening than on the box.
Winters at the taberna
Winters belong to the village taberna and to the chair nearest the stove. Martins plays fast, talks the whole way through and hands the cube to whoever wants it. On his telephone there is a photograph of a board from a match he lost there four years ago. He will show it to anybody. He has never photographed a win.
