The beginning
This story starts from the inside out. Inside was a force that pulsed and transformed the void, the inertia diluted, formed the idea. The outside, well ... The outside was the paper, pencil and sweat.
By the light of the idea of time, 20 years had passed into my existence. I found myself serving the body of Marines of Brazil in the city of Manaus. It would be better to say, "found me" or "there I could be found", because the encounter of myself was not even in its embryonic phase yet.
I was a boy knocking on certainties, discovering untruths, experiencing things like a frozen child in his naivete and divided between the frustration of that work I learned so much to hate, with thoughts about a different world, but asleep in my mind.
But this story also starts from the outside in. I didn't want to fool the reader, I didn't do it for evil, but for spontaneity. For the spontaneity of revealing to myself what I am writing. I say this because there is a "out" hidden before inside, and this was a tedious day of my routine, in that purposeless barracks for a soul like mine. A day when someone brought a chess board to play in rest time.
I already knew chess. I even played a few times using my shallow knowledge about their rules. But that day, when observing these two colleagues leaning in that game, a combustion happened in my mind, from multiple sources that are hard to discern, but I can cite some: boredom, sadness and hyperactivity. Thus were the ingredients that made me eagerly await the end of that work to get home and start sketching the idea of a board game. A game that made sense in my mind and snatched her from the months to come and would have to pass a Marine before my dismissal leave and leave.
Find out, reader. I don't have an intimate past with board games, except a few I played in my teens. I didn't know where to go very well, but I had an idea that I needed to be born, be pushed, whatever it was.
I worked for days, obsessed with the idea of creating an exciting, original, true game as my anguish. Between scribbles and scribbles written on any leaf, the first rules, the first mechanics and the molds of what would be this dreamed game called the Breastplate would come.
Breastplate? Isn't it Calamandara?
Wait, my dear reader. The analogy of "outside" is not over yet. I have one last to show you. This came from my late father, who in one of our conversations, and that's well before my departure to Manaus, told me about a myth, an urban legend of his homeland, Ubajara. I will dedicate another post to tell this story better, but in short he said there was a hill in this bucolic place, and at the top of that hill there was a sphere, which stopped seemed to be the guardian of that landscape, clearly recognized by the figure of a palm tree that He spinned and spinned his leaves as if he had his own life, next to that peak. This sphere, lined with a worn leather, was the size of an adult man, and it was said that for the one who approached her very much, to suppress his curiosity, he would have a fatal destination.
Well, this story was in my head for a long time, and despite having little experience with modern board games, I knew it would be very interesting that mine had a theme! You can already deduce the theme that hooked me, and based on this old legend told by my father, I continued developing the game and baptized it. In this version of the game, there was even a sphere that descended by a ramp until he reached the player's pawn, bringing his defeat to his defeat.
But then? How has it changed?
See, the idea of time is very strange and the human intentions even more. In the next post about this story I will tell you how the game of that fickle boy in search of something that gave him sense went from breastplate to Abyss of the Symbols, then Journey of Symbols and finally ... Calamandara.
See you soon.
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