How do you combine moving image, sound and the world of games? With a board game about the hand of a tortured queen, of course! Confused? Watch the video to find out. Gayatri Kodikal has devised a morbidly enthralling multimedia board game which gives players a chance to uncover the history behind the remains of the Queen Ketevan of Georgia. The intrigue behind the Georgian queen’s relics is what drove Kodikal to pursue this story. Despite being tortured and killed in Iran, the queen’s hand ended up in St Augustine’s complex at Old Goa. Archeologists still ponder over how the hand ended up here in India. This is essentially the premise of the game. The Travelling Hand: Smelling Palimpsests Under Moonlit Mangroves is a game where you play as antiquarian film hunters. You excavate Time, Memory and Laterite through the mechanisms of the game to resurrect ancient ruins in a mangrove in Velha Goa. You look around for ‘film molecules’ that trace fragments of a report that investigates an unresolved history of the queen’s mortal remains. It is almost like searching for clues about the Queen in an afterlife universe of the travelling hand. Quite like the actual writing of history, you unearth details and interpretations of the story to come up with your own version of how the Queen’s hand ended up in Goa. The game takes advantage of the falsities of history to come up with a different conclusion every time. The Travelling Hand is supported by an Arts Practice grant from India Foundation for the Arts, and is underwritten by Tata Steel.