On the parched brown steppe at the south-western edge of Russia, a huge glass dome reaches into the sky, intended to house all the things a person can imagine as long as the things the person imagines are related to Parchís, an adaptation of the Indian board game Pachisi, the ancestor of Ludo. A block of glass, gleaming supra-photographically, sturdily mounted among immaculate snows and scatterings of rocks. A mirage, it seems. Training areas, lodgings for people taking courses and for the course leaders, spaces for video screenings, computer programming laboratories for sketching out games, gyms for relaxing/focusing before the game, 1 library stocked solely with books about the red pieces, another stocked solely with books about yellow pieces, another with books solely about blue pieces, another with books solely about green pieces, a restaurant and specific diets for the students, 1 canteen for visitors and 2 libraries dedicated to the history of Parchís. The palace is situated on the outskirts of Ulan Erge, a city in the Russian Republic of Kalmykia – north of the Caspian Sea and directly between the recently formed republics of Ukraine and Kazakhstan: a corridor of land shaped like a strangulated tongue. 300,000 Russian men and women live in poverty around this great complex dedicated to Parchís. The outer edges of the palace grounds segue into an expanse segmented by semi-concrete paths, leading to a horizon busy with unconnected telephone masts. The area is often visited by stray mules, which might sleep in an old hut meant for electric transformers, or graze among the radio and television masts placed there long ago. This skin of antennae describes an irregular circle a little over a mile wide around the Parchís palace, though it is unconnected with Parchís; the excellent elevation, the lack of interference and the privileged Eurasian borderland situation simply recommended the region to the Russian government as a place to install antennae, lots of them. The president here, a man named Iluminizhov, came up with the idea of the palace; his passion for the game led him to pour huge sums of his own money bringing the fantasy to life – his own money as in state funds, plus the odd windfall from alliances with Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Such is the depression in the region that even refugees from the Second Chechen War do not linger. The water is not drinkable, and many who avoided death on the battlefield perish here. The peoples native to the steppe were nomads, and aspects of that way of life still pertain; when they find themselves excluded in some way or ejected from a place, or if they run out of ways to provide for themselves, they dismantle their homes, leaving only the foundations, pile the bricks, windows, kitchens and bathrooms into trucks and carts, and move on. But the immaculate Parchís palace has lain empty since it was built, 10 years ago now. No red ribbon was cut, and far less has it seen any use or inhabitation. From inside all you can hear is the battering wind outside. The books line the shelves, programmes are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in refrigerators remains intact, the board games are in the display cabinets, the counters and the dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio plays. A labourer left it switched on.