For fifty years Mikhail Smirnov has turned chess pieces on a lathe in Moscow, each one from a single block of wood, in a trade where the material sets the pace and haste is a mistake you pay for. The same workshop also makes Smirnov Boards: affordable, handmade wooden backgammon boards that sell in numbers his chess sets never could.
A real wooden board, at an honest price
The idea is simple. A real wooden board, made by hand, at a price an ordinary player can pay. The woodwork is Smirnov's own discipline: cut, joined and finished in the workshop by people he has trained himself. The rest is honest budget. The fittings are simple, the checkers are plastic, and not every board leaves the workshop with a perfect finish. Smirnov would be the first to say so, and the second to point at the price.
The Birch line
The Birch line carries short, plain names: Pagoda, Solas, Dorcha, Cultar. Each is a wooden board of the kind that has been played on for centuries, some with inlaid points and patterns in the old style, none with leather wrapping or anything else it does not need.
From Moscow to the café table
That is exactly why the boards travel. Smirnov's biggest market is not at home at all, but in the Arab world, where tawla is played in every café and on every doorstep, and where people want a board made of wood and nothing else. Leather, lacquer and wrapping are of no interest there. A wooden board that plays well and costs little is. Smirnov exports many thousands of boards a year to the region where the game has its deepest roots, and they have become a familiar sight on café tables from one end of it to the other.
Greece has followed. Smirnov boards are turning up more and more in the kafeneia and on the pavements, played loudly and often, which is how Smirnov thinks a board should be used.
At the board
He plays as he works, at one speed and without hurry. He announces every move before he makes it, plainly and without commentary, which newcomers take for courtesy and regulars recognise as something else. The only thing he does without a word is turn the cube. After fifty years of saying everything else out loud, the silence tends to land like a change in the weather.
