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Léon Saussine’s Voyage aérien autour du monde (c. 1912) is a lavish chromolithographed gameboard, issued shortly after Blériot’s Channel crossing, at the dawn of human flight.
The game invites players to accompany a squadron of spindly biplanes on a full circumnavigation of the world The serpentine course, marked off in 90 numbered stops, winds through a series landscape vignettes that dramatize both the thrills and the mishaps of pioneer flight. One panel shows a monoplane snarled in telegraph wires; another depicts a splintered seaplane sinking off the coast; elsewhere, a mid-air collision, a low-flying craft scattering an English shepherd’s flock, and a host of images evoking the joys and risks of early flight.
The anonymous illustrator, clearly influenced by contemporary illustrated periodicals, renders each scene with crisp outline, pastel washes, and just enough caricature to charm a juvenile audience, while still preserving the technical look of 1909-1912 aircraft with exposed engines, forward-canted undercarriages, and wire-braced wings.
Issued only a few years before commercial air routes became viable, the board prefigures the aviation-themed games that would flood the market after Lindbergh’s 1927 flight, making it one of the earliest mass-produced depictions of a purely aerial world tour.
