The Petsamo Board Game (1931) and Everyday Game Culture in Finland in the Interwar Period

The Petsamo board game, published in 1931 by the architect Frans Nyberg and designer Ruth Torén, is the subject of this study of everyday game culture in interwar Finland. Set against an industry dominated by inexpensive cardboard and paper games, with race games as the most typical genre, the work argues that this previously unstudied product deserves attention through the lenses of borderland and cultural colonialism. Its central claim is that the game used Lapland stereotypes to map and promote Petsamo, a region annexed under the 1920 Treaty of Tartu, and so served as a vehicle for Finnish settler ideology.

Close analysis of the board and rules shows Petsamo presented as both a tourist destination and an economic resource, Norway cast as a negative rival, and the Skolt Sámi portrayed ambivalently as helpful attractions and potential dangers. The designers' Northern travels, documented in Nyberg's 1933 travel writing and Torén's 1931 Lapland photograph, appear to have shaped these images. The game was self-financed, priced at 20 Finnish marks (roughly twice comparable titles), and advertised in a single Swedish-language Porvoo newspaper in December 1931, indicating a modest and regionally limited commercial reach.

The study's evidentiary base is largely a single surviving copy held by the Turku Museum Centre, donated by two brothers in 1996. Family archives, Olof Mustelin's memoirs, and childhood records show that the Mustelin family was upper-middle-class and that the brothers were avid players of games including Corona/Novuss, puzzles, and sports, with a collection of roughly twenty board and card games reflecting broad leisure habits. The authors conclude that Petsamo was both typical as a racing-style geographic game and exceptional as the first known board game depicting the region, produced independently by designers without prior experience. Evidence on its actual circulation and use, however, remains limited.