Where Every Game Is Kept: The Swiss Museum of Games

In a castle on the shore of Lake Geneva, between Vevey and Montreux, there is a museum devoted to the one thing almost every human culture has in common: play. The Swiss Museum of Games is the oldest institution of its kind, unique in Europe, and its collection runs from ancient board games to the screens of today. For a Game Boy archive in the same small country, it is both a neighbour and an inspiration.

Ten thousand games under one roof

The Musee Suisse du Jeu sits inside the Chateau de La Tour-de-Peilz, and it holds more than ten thousand games gathered from antiquity to the present and from all over the world. Its mission is the one every good archive shares: to conserve, research and share, in this case across the whole sweep of play, from dice and playing cards to strategy games and beyond. Where most museums specialise in a period or a place, this one specialises in an activity, which turns out to be one of the broadest and oldest subjects there is.

From board to pixel

What makes the museum especially interesting right now is where it has chosen to look next. Since 2023 its director has been Selim Krichane, a video game scholar and a co-founder of the GameLab at the University of Lausanne and EPFL. Under him the museum has made the video game a strategic priority, treating it as simply the newest chapter in the same long story of play. The exhibition From Board to Keyboard: An Archaeology of Video Games put that idea on the wall, drawing a direct line from the tabletop to the screen, and the museum has continued to weave digital play into a collection that began centuries before the microchip.

That matters, and not only in Switzerland. When an institution with this much history decides that video games belong in the record alongside chess and tarot, it lends real weight to an argument the games world has been making for years: that what we play is culture, and worth keeping.

A kindred spirit, close to home

This is a single-machine museum writing about a national one, and the two could hardly differ more in scale. But the impulse is identical: to take play seriously, and to make sure it is not lost. Whether it is ten thousand games spanning millennia in a lakeside castle or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work is the same, to treat something people often think of as trivial as the cultural record it actually is.

The Game Boy has its own place in that story. It is one of the machines that carried play out of the living room and into pockets and playgrounds everywhere, and it belongs on the same continuum the Swiss Museum of Games traces from the earliest board to the latest pixel. To have a museum of this stature, and in Switzerland no less, embrace the video game is a genuinely heartening thing.

Worth visiting

If you are near Lake Geneva, the museum is well worth the trip: a castle full of games from every era, open Tuesday to Sunday, with exhibitions that change through the year. You can plan a visit, or learn more about the collection and its work, at museedujeu.ch. It is one of several places worth seeking out, gathered in our guide to the video game museums worth visiting, with a closer look at the Swiss ones here. A museum that keeps every kind of game, and now the video game too, is exactly the sort of place this little archive is proud to stand alongside.