Tintin is perhaps Belgium’s most successful export product,1 so it’s not surprising that I feature him on my blog when he plays chess. And yet, the most famous chess scene in the whole Tintin saga, the one which gets interrupted by Tintin loudly shouting Tchang! after daydreaming, has escaped my treatment. The reason is that, in the comic, we can see Tintin and captain Haddock play chess, but there’s not the glimmer of a hope that the position could be reconstructed. So I left it alone — until I realised there was a cartoon series based on the comics in the early nineties.
I can recommend it! The plots are faithful to the comics, the voice acting is very good, the music is excellent, and the chess scene in the first Tintin in Tibet episode is rather extensive.
Tintin and captain Haddock are on a holiday in the mountains. After a long hike with Snowy, Tintin meets up with the captain in their hotel for dinner. Afterwards, they decide to play a game of chess. We’re looking on from the black side. Almost the whole board is in view. Only the first rank is – except for a small sliver – out of view. This seems to be the position:2
I don’t think they paid much heed to consistency, though: in other shots the position seems to be considerably different. Particularly, the black pieces on the eighth rank seem to morph into white ones sometimes.
It’s enough to sink captain Haddock,3 who has white, in deep thought:
Haddock’s inner monologue: Hm. Now, how do I save my queen?
You don’t have any queen! That should render her rescue fairly simple.
HIM:4 She’s going to have to fight a rearguard action, I’ll launch a flank attack with my bishop, then he will cover his castle with a pawn, and I’ll have to sacrifice the bishop. But he won’t be sacrificed in vain! An eye for an eye! I’ll take his castle.
Meanwhile Tintin is dreaming away. Dreaming of the snowy tops of the Himalaya, where more than half of the squares are white. And he dreams about his old friend, Chang, in terrifying trouble — and so he screams in horror and wakes up. He screams so loudly, in fact, that the pieces fly everywhere, the whole lounge jumps up, and a terrified Tintin has to stop playing and retire for the night. Probably, he saw Chang play the Bird.
Realism: 1/5 Most pieces are in vaguely probable places, although black’s pawn structure seems weird and there are two white sark-squared bishops.
Probable winner: Black is up a lot of material and should in normal circumstances win easily, but he abandoned the game and will therefore lose on time.
1. [So far! I’m hot on his heels, of course.] ↩
2. [If Tintin were a diagram editor, he’d be this one.] ↩
3. [What Rastapopoulos never managed, Tintin does easily!] ↩
4. [Hah! See what I did there?] ↩