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Report. New director of the Swiss Museum of Games More Play Experiences
Le Musée Suisse du Jeu—the Swiss Museum of Games—is located in the picturesque town of La Tour-de-Peilz, on the shore of Lake Geneva. The town, with a population of something over 12,000, is nestled between the cities of Vevey and Montreux and boasts its own unique 13th-century castle, which the municipality acquired in 1979. Two years later, the castle was a game museum, offering a special exhibition, “Table Games and Checkers.” Dr. Ulrich Schädler, an archeologist and world-renowned games expert, was brought in to manage the museum in 2002, where he remained for more than 20 years. Dr. Selim Krichane assumed the post of director in 2023, but his association with Musée Suisse du Jeu goes back to 2016, when, instead of military service, he chose to do civil service at the museum.
By BRUCE WHITEHILL
& Dragons came out in 1974) and col- lectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering (first released in 1993). He played Monopoly and “chase” games, but it wasn’t until his 20s that he devel- oped an interest in other board games. Though he still specializes in video games, he has a keen interest in table games. His studies in the humanities and media included research on the links be- tween cinema and video games, and this led to his MA and PhD degrees.
Since I, personally, have a love for skill- and-action games—which was, until re- cently, thought to be the purview of chil- dren—I asked Krichane how that genre fits into his area of interest and his plans for the museum. “We have them in the col- lections and will continue to acquire and study them; they are especially popular with the public at fairs and other events.”
And will the
focus of the
museum be on
more modern
playable games
or on historic
games? “I’m not
a specialist on
the historic, but
the museum will
focus on both—a strategic focus—espe- cially the links between the long history of games and contemporary play. We will approach the subject strategically, recog- nizing the fact that games are now more a part of everyday life. This means consid- ering the more recent history of games. And though our focus is on object-based games, I want to explore games that have no objects, such as ‘hide and seek.’ In oth- er words, forms of play.”
Jigsaw puzzles? Mechanical puzzles? “We have a large collection of 19th-cen- tury jigsaw and mechanical puzzles. In 2012, a collector, Paul Tapponnier, do- nated 217 games to the museum, among which we classified 68 as ‘mechanical puzzles.’ In total, we have 300 games classified as ‘casse-tête’” (which trans- lates as ‘brain teaser’), along with “a col- lection of over 300 jigsaw puzzles, mostly dating from the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
The museum has been undergoing ren- ovations of late; the castle will be closed eventually for renovation for a year or two, starting with work on the outlying buildings, but this will not affect exhi- bition space, Krichane assures me. The reception area has been moved to the ground floor with entrances both at the courtyard and on lake side. The muse-
F
of its long-term director, Ulrich Schädler, continued to delve into the world of games and bring its findings to the pub- lic. Schädler, perhaps the world’s leading researcher in the field of game antiquity, is one of the founders of the international Board Game Studies group, which holds a major international conference every year. He retired in March 2023 and left behind a legacy of archival information, having contributed to the museum’s out- standing collection of games from early times into the 21st century. The museum is run by a foundation, and the board choosed for the post as the new Direc- tor of the Musée Suisse du Jeu Selim Krichane. He describes himself as a “re- searcher by trade.” A colleague describes him as having “an excellent network” and being “definitively a driving force.”
The 37-year-old Krichane was born in Vevey and grew up near there. At age nine, he moved with his parents to Kua- la Lumpur, Malaysia, where he stayed for nine years before returning to Swit- zerland. He grew up watching his older brothers play video games, which had become very popular by the 1990s, and started playing them when he was five or six years old. He learned the card games of the Mediterranean, especially of Tu- nisia, since his father was from there, and his Swiss-German mother joined in with traditional card games and a few conventional board games. Later on, he “discovered American games,” taking an interest in role-playing games (Dungeons
or twenty years I have watched as the
museum, under the deft leadership
On Exhibit
The first major exhibition under the aegis of the Swiss Muse- um of Game’s new director, Selim Krichane, runs until early January 2025 under the title, “De la case au pixel: archéologie du jeu video,” with the English title, “From Board to Keyboard: Video Game Archeolo- gy.” It shows the link between con- temporary games and video games, and introduces visitors to the long history of games. Eight rooms have been set aside, each with a different theme around game mechanics and presenting the historic lineage of the games therein. (bw)
Photos: Selim Krichane, Musée Suisse du Jeu