The Swiss Museum of Games - Musee Suisse du Jeu

Goddesschess first met Dr. Ulrich Schaedler in Amsterdam at the end of November, 2001 when Don McLean, Georgia Albert, her daughter Michelle, and I attended a symposium of chess historians, scholars and interested parties at the Max Euwe Institute under the auspices of the Initiativ Gruppe Konigstein ("IGK"). 

Dr. Schaedler or, Stooping Wolf, as we know him (we all gave ourselves 'nicknames' over the years), has been a friend of Gchess ever since.  A year or so ago he visited Georgia in Las Vegas with friends/family to attend a concert at the MGM Grand performed by a group that he'd always wanted to see.  At the time the euro v. dollar ratio was so favorable, the trip was made at a greatly discounted price.  When we first visited Amsterdam in 2001, the price ratio was the just the opposite, and we got round-trip airfares out of Montreal for $333 each, and hotel rooms in Amsterdam for about $30 USD a night.  Back then, we paid in The Netherlands' old currency -- the Euro hadn't been officially adopted by the country at the time!  How times change...

But we don't.  Oh yes, we grow older as we look at ourselves in the mirror and in photographs, but in our heart and in our mind's eye, we remain the same forever -- at whatever "age" we thought we were our "best" ...  In truth, we are always at our best, even as we age, as long as we maintain our zest to always make ourselves better and to keep on learning new things.  Shhhhh, that's a secret not everyone has realized. 

While visiting GM Alexandra Kosteniuk's chessqueen.com, I found photographs of Alexandra and Dr. Ulrich Schaedler taken at The Swiss Museum of Games when she visited there in October, 2011.  Ulrich has been curator at the Museum for several years. When Ulrich first took over as curator, the Musee did not even have a decent website!  Glad to say that now, it does!

In 1999, Don McLean represented Goddesschess at an IGK Symposium in Hamburg, Germany, and gave a talk about how the internet would change the future of research into the origins of chess and other ancient boardgames and how it would facilitate collaberation and the publication of research.  Back then, Don's talk was met with some skeptical eyes, but what he talked about that day proved to be true as the internet grew and grew and grew, and Goddesschess grew along with it.  Now, we take it for granted that you can type in just about any subject you want to find out more about into your favorite search engine, and you will get some results.  But back then, it was still new, and there wasn't much information available like the info we compiled.

On May 6, 2012, Goddesschess will celebrate its 13th anniversary online.  Whew!  Hard to believe.  We're not getting older, we're just getting better and better and better...

Stooping Wolf, you're a handsome man!