The Vint.ee portal turned 10 years old!

Hello, 10 years ago today, the first game of the vint.ee portal took place. 10 years is a very respectable age for a hobby project. On this occasion, we will give a short overview of how we have come this far. Vint.ee was founded by men from Hummuli, Tõrva, Puhja and Jõgeva. Their names were Kaspar Soer, Indrek Saar, Jaanus Jaakma and Marten Meikop respectively. Such a motley group met at the turn of the millennium at Nõo High School of Science. In addition to the fact that we were classmates and lived in adjacent rooms in a dormitory, we were also united by a deep interest in computer science. While studying at school, we programmed worm games and drawing programs in Turbo Pascal to win each other over. The first steps in creating vint.ee took place at Tallinn University of Technology, where Marten and Jaanus began programming an online checkers playing system in order to use it to do various subject projects. Marten also added the ability to play chess to the system and wrote both his bachelor's and master's theses on the subject. When it was clear that the game system was working, database support, portal functionality and content management were needed. Indrek and Kaspar, who had more experience in PHP programming, came to the rescue. At the end of 2006, a private limited company was also created to manage the portal - Newrock Solutions OÜ. Around the same time, our fifth classmate - Tiit Vunk from Suure-Jaani - also came to our aid. One important thing was missing - the name of the portal. One evening at the end of 2006, we got together in Jaanus's apartment in Mustamäe, drank a few beers and then suddenly it came - vint.ee. We started setting up the portal at the beginning of 2007 and the first recorded game (which was a game of gomoku) took place on 27.02.2007 at 11:11. The portal has had both good and bad times. Mind games enthusiasts quickly found us - to date, we have played a million games of chess and checkers and solved over a million sudoku puzzles. A major substantive update took place in 2011, when we separated the different checkers and chess games into separate game rooms. Our only decline in statistical numbers dates back to that time. In 2013, we made a big technical leap - we threw away Java applets and rewrote the games to JavaScript, which allowed vint.ee games to be played on smartphones. We found new life in 2014, when we started bringing traditional card games to Vint that we played at a table together, but which could not be played online - Bismarck, Tuhat, and last year we also brought Sasku to Vint. These games have multiplied our usability. We have also started using the environment to popularize mental sports (chess, checkers) among schoolchildren - Marten has led the Mental Sports Olympiad, in which over 70 schools and approximately a thousand students participate every year. To date, the portal has been our hobby project for 10 years, we have dedicated 7,600 hours of our free time to it. Indrek and Kaspar have given up active activities, and the project has been led by Marten, who is helped by good advice from Jaanus and Tiit. We do our best to ensure that our users have a comfortable environment in which to spend their free time and put their minds to work. We will celebrate our birthday on Saturday at Klaaramanni Holiday Center! Best wishes, Vint.ee Team

I have attended both Tõrva Gymnasium and NRG... so I fully support your work. :)

CONGRATULATIONS TO VIND ON HIS 10TH ANNIVERSARY!

Good luck and success! And many new great games and players!

Congratulations to the Vindi team and players :D

Happy 10th anniversary to Vint from me too (afterwards)! ;D But when Mustamäe came up with vint.ee in 2006, did it come from being in Vint or thinking about the bird (Vint) or was it actually related to Vint's shot (Vintpall)?

Unfortunately, I don't remember that anymore.