When we look at the history of civilization, we find evidence that whenever human beings have spare time, human beings play. Sometimes a person plays alone, when solving a Sudoku puzzle for instance, and sometimes we play against others, as in chess. But no matter what, there has always been the need to play.

Throughout history, humanity has created hundreds of thousands of games. A majority has been lost in the passage of time, but multitudes have survived.

We can’t know all of them for there are too many, but there lives a man in Baltimore named Michael Keller who is the world’s foremost expert in games.

Keller was born in Remscheid, Germany, on May 31, 1949, and has devoted his life to games, beginning with chess. He has never been too interested in playing regular chess, but rather in chess composition. In fact, Keller is one of the five chess composition grand masters of Germany.

For those chess aficionados up for a challenge and a broader study of the game, 279 of his compostional masterpieces can be found in Friedrich Chlubna’s 1994 book, “Michael Keller–A Master of Chess Composition.”

Yet Keller’s love for games goes beyond chess. When he moved to the U.S. he founded the publication, “World Game Review,” a magazine featuring a massive variety of games and puzzles. Keller can make your brain twist trying to solve some of the games. His objective is always the same, to challenge your mental capacity as much as possible.

Keller cut his teeth in the field of computer games, creating a goodly number of them in what he calls his “Solitaire Laboratory.”

On his Internet page we can read: “I have been studying and playing solitaire avidly since 1992. During that time I have played most of the hundreds of computer solitaires which have appeared, acquired and read dozens of books on the subject, played thousands of games in hundreds of different variants, and researched many games to work out the win rates and to correct discrepancies in the rules.”

Today we present the chess composition with which he won the “Jubiläums‑Turnier der Schwalde 2002.” It is a three‑move problem, his specialty.