Blue Marble

Blue Marble is a board game for two to four players in which dice carry aeroplane pieces round a green board of world cities. Players buy title deeds, build villas, buildings and hotels, and collect tolls from anyone who lands on them, paid in banknotes of the imaginary Si-Yat Bank from 1,000 to 500,000 won. Golden Key cards bring windfalls and fines, a deserted island holds players for three turns, a space-travel square sends them anywhere, and Seoul is the dearest square on the board.

Its maker, Lee Sang-bae, was a young designer who had played Monopoly in a hotel lobby in Abu Dhabi. He wanted something similar for Korean children, but set across the whole planet, and named it after the Apollo 17 photograph of the Earth, spelling it Bu-ru-ma-bul so that children could say it. An economist introduced by the designer of its logo wrote the rules, inflating Monopoly's dollars into large won notes so that making change would teach arithmetic, and the cities were laid out in order of their countries' national product.

The launch, on Children's Day 1982, nearly failed. At 8,300 won the game was dear, and wholesalers who had never handled a board game sent back almost every set. Lee turned to small toy shops, flyposted school gates and handed out comic-strip leaflets drawn by the cartoonist Lee Hyang-won in apartment playgrounds. When children could not find it in the shops, the wholesalers came back, and by December it was on television.

It became the national board game, the one older Koreans remember playing for hours at a time. The world on the board has been redrawn as the world changed, Beijing for Hong Kong, Bern for Zurich, but the game itself has been left alone: Lee wanted the people who played it as children to recognise it when they played with their own. Si-Yat-Sa, now run by his son, still sells it, the box marked 'Since 1982'.