It will be one of the star gifts under the Christmas trees this year: the chessboard! The success of the Netflix series “The lady’s game”, which tells the fictional story of an orphan girl who became a chess champion in the 1960s, sparked a real popular craze for this centuries-old strategy game. In the city center of Poitiers, for example, you can no longer find any for purchase today.
Strong increase in sales
The board game shops on the “plateau”, that’s what we call the Pictavian hyper-center, have been robbed in anticipation of the holidays. The sellers themselves are amazed, like Simon, the manager of the three-sided Dé, rue Grimaux:
I hear about this series all the time “
The manager of the pictave store finds that “funny that a series revives sales of a game deemed complicated anyway”. In this establishment, one of the salesmen confides thattwenty times more chessboards have been sold than last year in December.
Unpredictable success
For Benjamin, manager of Labo de Merlin, rue Boncenne, nobody could have imagined such enthusiasm. Of course, “we quickly heard about the series,” he says. Customers told us: “there will be more and more people who will take up chess, but we didn’t believe it”.
Usually chess games at Christmas, this board game store manager sells less than a dozen throughout the month of December. But this year, he had requests five to six a day !
“We quickly ran out of stock and when we wanted to restock it, our suppliers had no more”
The reasons for success
Board game professionals try to decipher the phenomenon. Traditionally, chess is considered more of a male game, explains one of the vendors, but there “the heroine is a woman“. With this series, the game of chess is undoubtedly desecrated and more open to women.
The fact that there is precisely no chance, no dice, only strategy, it also plays into the success of this centuries-old game. And the seven-episode miniseries shows it well: “Anyone can play chess as long as they work on their strategy”, points out another seller.
Released in October 2020 in France, the series was number one of the most viewed titles during the lockdown on the SVOD subscription video on demand platform. But the craze is wider: the Lady’s Game was seen by 62 million subscribers worldwide.
More club registrations?
Beyond the sales of games in stores, clubs or Chess associations of the Poitou conurbation, new registrations are also expected to resume post-containment activities, from January 20 if the health situation allows. In the meantime, the people of Poitou, young and old, will have plenty of time to learn how to best move their pawns, knights and other checkers on the 64 black and white squares of their chess games freshly brought by Santa Claus this year.
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