The Petsamo Board Game (1931) and Everyday Game Culture in Finland in the Interwar Period

Abstract

<p>The paper studies the Petsamo board game, published independently in Finland in<br>1931. This racing-genre game consisted of a game board map situated in the Petsamo<br>area in northern Lapland. Originally, Petsamo was mainly populated by Sámi people<br>and only officially became a part of Finland after the 1920 Treaty of Tartu between<br>Finland and Soviet Russia. After the Treaty, Petsamo became an arena for several<br>activities that can nowadays also be examined as borderland and cultural colonialism,<br>such as establishing new settlements, mineral prospecting, tourism, the production of<br>Petsamo-related artworks and so forth. In this paper, we approach the Petsamo game<br>within a larger cultural historical context and analyse the representations of Petsamo in<br>the game board and the instruction booklet as well as the activities of the designers of<br>the game and players who originally owned the copy of the game that is currently held<br>in the collection of the Turku Museum Centre. Thus, methodologically, the paper<br>presents a holistic microhistorical example of non-digital game history.<br></p>