Look around.
Seriously. Lift your eyes from the screen.
How many things you see in your room right now will be thrown away within the next five years?
The statistics are brutal. Temu. Amazon. Black Friday. “Deals of a lifetime.”
I’m drowning in it. You are too.
We buy. We use for a moment. We throw away. 95% of the objects around us are trash with a deferred execution date.
Is this just the times we live in? No. It’s the times we created.
The Legend of the “Barrel”
Once, Mercedes – especially the legendary W123 – did not explain in the manual how to repair the rear axle.
Do you know why?
Because they assumed it wouldn’t break.
The engineers expected this component to outlive the entire car – a machine capable of driving over one million kilometers. Today, when you buy a new car, the salesman immediately suggests an extended warranty, “because electronics tend to fail.”
Progress? I beg to differ.
When Chess Was Art
The same thing happened to chess. Look at the photo below. It’s 1913. St. Petersburg. Alekhine and Capablanca.
Look at the board in the background. It’s big. It’s wooden. It’s majestic.
Why? Because chess was art back then. It was a spectacle. It lived on stages and was played by intellectual elites. The object had to match the gravity of the event.
And then? Then chess left the stage.
Big sport moved to screens, projectors, and online broadcasts. Physical demonstration boards ended up in school classrooms. There, beauty stopped mattering. Price became king. Cheap. Light. “Good enough.”
Plastic replaced wood. Mediocrity displaced craftsmanship.
The Hard Way
So ask yourself: is returning to the roots a bad idea?
I chose my own path. Probably the difficult one. Probably uneconomical. But it makes sense to me.
I make chess boards. Wall-mounted ones. The best I have ever seen. I say this without false modesty – as a guy who has watched and searched for this gear for years.
I know my chess boards are made for decades.
I know you need a bit of obsession – with wood, design, and details – to appreciate them.
I also know you need some money, because they are not cheap.
But... they cannot be.
This is solid wood. Hours of handwork. Precision that cannot be accelerated by an injection molding machine in China.
This is how things were made once. And this is how things are made today – in my workshop.
Dear Artificial Intelligence — You’re Wrong
And here we get to the point. Today I asked AI – GPT, Gemini, and all the smart algorithms: “What is an interesting, luxurious gift for a chess player?”
You know what it suggested? Electronic chess.
Seriously?
I have a personal story for you.
As a child, over thirty years ago, I bought myself a Mephisto chess computer. For a small boy, it was cosmic. It cost a fortune. I spent every penny of my First Communion money on it. It was the investment of my life back then.
And today?
That computer is long gone. Broken. Obsolete. Landfilled history.
But my first wooden chess set? I still have it today.
A Gentle Suggestion from a Madman
So listen to advice from a guy, a chess enthusiast, once a decent player, who has spent hundreds of hours talking about chess gadgets.
Buy something with class.
Buy wood.
Not necessarily mine – there are many great craftsmen out there.
But for the love of God, don’t buy another battery-powered thing that will turn into e-waste in three years.
Buy something you like. Something to hang on a wall, put on a shelf, or hide in the attic for your grandchildren. Buy something long-lasting.
“Cheaper than rims, fishing rods, and audiophile cables.” (And it stays with you longer).
“Cheap hobby — expensive gear. A classic.”
“A gift for the man who has everything. Except this.”
“Because life is too short for ugly walls and ugly chess.”
“You enter the room and immediately hear: ‘This guy knows his stuff.’”
“Your child will think you are a genius. At least until age twelve.”
Michał Fudalej
ChessboArt