The Tangram...

Most board games leave me well, bored, but there are some delightful exceptions topping the boxed heaps of chaff. One of these is that tantalising Chinese puzzle, the tangram. Its origins are lost in millennia, and it arrived in America in 1815, shipped by a Captain M. Donaldson. It was an instant hit in the parlour-bound society of the West where countless ladies sat, looking for material to manipulate with relentlessly restless fingers. The tangram, also a brain teaser, proved an ideal distraction.
It consists of a square carved into seven definable geometric pieces, five triangles, a parallelogram and a small square, a fraction the area of its larger parent. These shapes can be formed into thousands of patterns that resemble people, animals, birds and so on. Their stylised nature is prescient of suprematism, an artistic philosophy that emerged in the early twentieth century. Kasimir Malevich found abstract, geometrical forms the embodiment of a higher reality. Whatever, there is something eminently soothing about the hours spent focused upon these shapes, forming and reforming them again.
The tangram presents a number of mathematical paradoxes best defined by experts in the many books written about it. The puzzle can be made of materials like plastic, cardboard, and so on. But for a more sensual touch, seek out a set in classy wood. My young niece has a ‘competitive’ version, where two players seek to outwit each other in constructing tangram forms selected at random from a deck of cards. But I would eschew the competitive element and simply get lost in the sheer pleasure got from working with ‘pure’ forms, a reminder that I once dubbed geometry visual poetry.