Chaiva

A warm little game for a quiet kitchen moment, with one green tea leaf riding a curl of steam. Ingredients • One tea leaf that rises on a puff of steam with each touch • Copper tea tins hanging from the cupboards above • Stacks of cups topped with jade teapots rising from the counter • Sugar cubes and cardamom pods floating in the gaps • A tea route of 20 stops, from Hangzhou in China to Misiones in Argentina • A pinch of history: 27 pinboard facts from 19 countries Method 1. Pick the next stop on the tea route; each one opens when the stop before it is cleared. 2. Touch to lift the leaf, then let it float gently down again. 3. Ease it through the space between the tins and the cups, gathering sugar and pods as you go. 4. Reach the steaming cup at the end of the counter for one to three stars, 60 in all across the route. 5. From Sri Lanka onwards the gaps begin to move, so let the leaf rest a moment and watch the rhythm first. To serve Pour a little Steam Relax between busier things: an endless, unhurried drift with wide gaps, no speed-up and a distance record in metres, plus a list of recent floats. Then settle in with the pinboard, where tea and coffee customs from Japan to Morocco are ticked off as you read them, and a fill-in-the-word quiz of ten sentences a round. Stars fill the cupboard with twelve hand-drawn vessels, from a porcelain teacup and a gaiwan to a samovar, beside a page of kitchen stats. No sound plays, haptics and drifting steam can be switched off, and everything works offline with no account.