The Chess Map

The idea was simple enough: if chess has spent 150 years borrowing the names of cities, why not give those names back their geography? Chess players know the Berlin Defense, the Vienna Game, the London System, the Riga Gambit, the Moscow Variation. But no one had ever drawn them together into a single picture.

So we did. Together with Yuri Gordon — the celebrated type designer whose work has defined whole alphabets — we created the first map of chess. A chart where openings and variations are placed back onto the map: Berlin in Berlin, Riga in Riga, Paris in Paris. It looks part atlas, part design object, part chess history lesson.

The backstory is even stranger. Until the 1930s, tournaments were effectively a form of real estate advertising. Hotels in Baden-Baden, Bled, and Marienbad invited players to compete in the off-season, when rooms were cheap and dining halls sat empty. They’d lure a few journalists, and if a new move was born in the tournament, the name stuck. Chess theory as marketing copy. A hotel stay turned into an opening line, and suddenly the city had a kind of immortality.

The map makes this visible for the first time. It shows how openings are not only theory but also travel history, how the board has always been bigger than sixty-four squares. It’s a piece of iconography the game has been missing — one that turns analysis into cartography and makes strategy feel like navigation.

We wanted to give chess a little more cultural code, something to hang on the wall as easily as a city map or a vintage timetable. And like all good maps, it doesn’t just document the world — it asks you to choose a route.

Currently, the map is sold out in the World Chess shop, and we are planning to do local editions (Map of the country) if we find enough openings.