Branham was a worldly gamesman of astonishing scope- in my years of knowing the man no contest of card, dice, or pawn proved beyond his mastery and there were but few games he regarded with ill favor. His collection of games both popular and esoteric was celebrated among hobbyists around the world as a catalogue of Alexandrian proportions, indexed and accessioned in a fashion that would satisfy the organizational impulses of the most rigorous librarian.
To browse the more obscure titles in his collection was to peer beneath the ordinary fun and frivolity that veils some of the more mysterious- and very dangerous- games not often featured in the common man’s vernacular of amusement pastimes. The dreaded Architects of Dead R’lyeh, designed by a mathematician who went on to claw out his eyes in a futile attempt to remove his own brain rests there alongside the forbidden Pnakotic Draughts--reputed throughout fin de siecle Europe to have provoked several unspeakably brutal acts of murder. Among the rarer artifacts in Branham’s possession are an ancient Roman gameboard and several fragmented pieces attributed to the infamous cult leader Launius. The board depicts a nameless, obscene entity devouring a great metropolis undoubtedly lost (or stricken) from the historical record and it is assumed that the game would have been used not as entertainment but evangelization.
When I first made Branham’s acquaintance some years ago while we were studying at Miskatonic University he looked nothing like the pale, quivering, emaciated thing that now gibbers wildly in a tiny cell deep in the asylum that rests just outside of Arkham, Massachussetts. In those days his obsessions, although perhaps not healthy, were certainly harmless and many regarded his activities as a quaint, youthful pastime. He would often pursue forgotten or ignored games of days past in the city’s more remote antique shops or in dusty, mildewed corners of retail establishments well off the beaten track and often his fervor for the collection and acquisition of these games interfered with his studies but never enough to jeopardize his marks.
Of course, this was a time before that game, whose proper title is lost to obscurity, became the dividing line between sanity and insanity for poor Branham and indeed the impetus for my own descent into the nether darkness where the minds of men become but jelly in a swirl of cosmic instability. I can still hear the brittle, maddening chatter of his teeth as he was carried away. I can still hear him screaming alien, guttural words as strong men struggled to subdue him. I tremble to write them, yet I find comfort that my approximation fails to convey the verbal foulness of them- “Ia! Ia! Dhau Phg’na Azathoth! Ia Ia! Ghat Hngu’th Azathoth!”
The source of Branham’s madness could not have been anything other than this shunned and benighted game, despite the best practices of modern psychiatry and their shamefully inept and ignorant suggestions of various feeble diagnoses. Obsessive/compulsive disorder. Neurosis. Delusion. I knew Branham before his madness, and I witnessed the man begin to sink into the loss of his mind slowly, as a fly in molasses, when he learned of this game reputed to have been published in the 1920s by a tiny German printing house with some tenuous connection to the occult-minded Thule Society that would later provide Adolf Hitler and other so-called Nazi mystics with enough misinterpreted quasi-occult claptrap to supply an entire nation with bizarre and nonsensical beliefs. The game, over the years, has become something of a legend among interested parties with stories circulating wildly regarding alternately either its existence or complete obscurity- no record exists to this day of it ever having actually been played. Many game collectors had assumed it to be completely lost to obscurity while others believed it never existed at all. But still others, and Branham among them, took the game to be the “holy grail” acquisition of their hobby- an ultimate artifact and crowning achievement for collectors of games.
I won’t- and in fact, couldn’t due to their arcane and mutable nature- speak at length about the mechanics, gameplay, or components of the dread game but I will relate certain particulars of it that I experienced when Branham arrived at my flat that grey, besotted day for an evening of board gaming and vintage brandy with an unfamiliar title proudly stacked atop our usual favorites. I knew almost immediately what it was despite the vague, indecipherable and strangely alien runic fonts festooning the battered, moldering box.
“You’ve found it.” I stated.
Branham looked at me with an almost childlike grin and nodded affirmatively.
“But how…where?”
