Board Walking...(part 3) : Round The World in 80 Minutes

"Desh Ludo"was a nice game. I guess not many of today's kids will even know what that game was all about. Basically it's a dice and token based game. The board had a world map in it, and almost 108 major cities from different countries and continents were marked in the map. Each city was numbered, and each of them were connected via imaginary roads. The game had a simple logic. The first person to go from Dhaka to Mekka would win.

The game started from "nowhere". Yes, all the players would be in "nowhere" (which I loved to refer to as Moon, or anywhere else in the universe) and they would throw the dice to get a 1. As soon as someone got a 1, he'd get an "International Visa",which'd allow them to travel around. The word Visa was actually mentioned in the game instructions. There was no separate manual for this. The instructions were adequately detailed, and printed on a box positioned in the lower right corner of the board (Just beside Australia, and below the Indian Sea).

The board was quite big. It was about 3 feet wide and 2 feet long. The map was nicely decorated with different colors used for separating different parts of the world. It was still USSR era, and that was reflected in the map. Anyways, players would throw the dice, and their respective tokens would advance accordingly. The tokens were made off cheap plastic, and the shape was round, with a couple of circular layers within (sub circles). There were caption boxes set against several locations on the map. When a player's token arrived at such a location, he or she would have to follow the instruction written in that caption box.

As an example, in Colombo (capital of Sri Lanka), it said "Colombo ashiya steamer joge Sydney gomon ". This means your token would take the naval route, and go directly to Sydney (from 9 to 15, as far as I remember). So before their turn, players would always hope for dropping by such "bonus" locations. However, all locations were not pleasant. In Algeria, you fall victim of a Sand storm, and you can't go anywhere for the next 3 turns. It was damn frustrating to sit idle while all other players would gallop around merrily. The worst peril was a location just 3/4 steps before the final destination. It'd send you all the way back to the beginning location. Basically that was the most undesired and unfortunate case in the whole game. The stated reason was "Omuk karone mrittu. Abar shuru korun". So whenever people got around that location, they'd start saying prayers!

The game involved a lot of fun.

"Brazil ey rubber chash korte giye lokshan. 3 na pora porjonto opekkha korun".

"Gari durghotonay ahoto. Switzerland er Zurich Hashpatal ey chikitshar jonno gomon korun. 2 na pora porjonto opekkha korun".

"Babylon er shunnoddan dekhe montro mugdho. 2 chal boshe thakun"

It was an educative game as well. Thanks to the game, when I was in class 5, I knew a lot of cities, and I also knew the location of those cities. The map was quite accurate. But it did gave a false impression that all the cities of the world are actually linked by roads.

I got two atlas books on a birthday, and soon after the guests had gone away, I tried to match the real map with the Desh Ludo map. It was fun. I am really thankful to this game. It injected a liking for geography in to me, and based on this liking, I moved on to other things like knowing the flags and currencies of different countries. And yes, I am no nerd. I did these things out of plain curiosity and it was a hobby, not a ritual.

I kept the board with me for a long time, but at end of my school life, I didn't have any partners to play with. My regular partners, the cousins, got tired of the game, and moved on to other more attractive games. One day, while reshuffling our rooms, the board was cramped under a bed, along with a lot of other stuffs. The next time I saw it, it was torn by the middle, and we had to trash it.

It was a sad day for me. Genuinely a sad day. Be it a silly board game, but I had a lot of emotions with it. It's been many years since I saw a Desh Ludo board, but when I close my eyes, I can still visualize it.

I've heard that this game was actually copied from some English board game (Risk or something), but I always liked to think that it's an innnovation by some unknown Bangladeshi person. It was a source of pride for a 10 year old kid. I don't want to take away that pride by googling and finding out the origin of the game.

I think I'll go and look for a Desh Ludo board in the markets. After all, nostalgia shouldn't be ignored.