There is this great vintage furniture store called Stepback in Vancouver, BC that had a wall covered with various chinese checker boards. The owner explained how his wife is in love with them, and I could see the appeal and was quite taken by them as well. I asked if he had any sets with all the pieces, and he said I was in luck, there was one that just came in with not only all of the marble chinese checker pieces, but also checker pieces to play regular checkers on the other side! It was meant to be, I took the set home, have since played multiple games with a certain boy. And even though I only win maybe a quarter of the time against him, I am quite smitten with this game and all the criss-ing and cross-ing of the pieces and jumping around and the imperfect marbles.
I wanted to do an illustration to kind of celebrate this set and how it made some minutes during the summer of 2009 quite wonderful.
