A Sign of No Business

One day, I was walking down Berry Street in Williamsburg when I noticed an elderly gentleman cautiously surveying card tables laid out with what appeared to be chess sets outside a small ramshackle garage. He was going about it very deliberately, though I sensed he was approachable. The pieces were large and blocky. Some were plain and others ornately carved, but what caught my eye was the unfinished piece he held gingerly in his hand. I made some comment about the pieces and he responded with a challenge.  Boasting that he could beat a Grand Master, he challenged me in a thick Greek accent to beat him at “his game.” I’d win $100 if he lost, but I wanted to know more about this game of his. 

And so, for well over an hour we sat together like friends from the Old Country. We reminisced about how Brooklyn was over thirty years ago when he emigrated here from Greece. How dangerous it was. How difficult it was to make a decent living and yet how one could more easily make enough to get by whatever you did anyway. Following his family’s story from Bulgaria to Turkey to Greece and finally to the United States, Christopher “Elis” Voulgarelis eventually opened up about his unique creations, his games.

Elis is a self-taught woodworker who made his first chess set when he was ten. He continued making them on the side while he ran a trucking operation and later as a cabbie. His primary tool is an X-Acto knife. He designed two original games: Give & Take and Escape. Give & Take is a simplified form of Turkish checkers as there so many different variations and it can take seventy-five moves before a game is called a draw. The story behind Escape is more interesting. It was created out of Elis’ frustration with the police when he was a cabbie. He believed they picked on him because of his heavy Greek accent. In Escape, there are only three pyramid shaped pieces. One represents the cabbie and the other two, the police. The cabbie’s objective is to lose the police to avoid paying a steep fine for some traffic infraction in five moves or less. At least, this is what motivates poor Elis when he’s playing!

Elis uses wood from discarded furniture to make his games and despite his experience as a cabbie, he’s a proud New Yorker. In fact, some of his pieces resemble the towers under construction at the new World Trade Center. While Elis never made it big with his games, he makes them for his own edification while “trying to make fun of the world.” As if to emphasize this, he quotes, “business with no sign is a sign of no business.”