Uno (card game)
Card game
Uno ( ; from Spanish and Italian for 'one'), stylized in all caps as UNO, is a proprietary American shedding-type card game originally developed in 1971 by Merle Robbins in Reading, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, that housed International Inc., a gaming company acquired by Mattel on January 23, 1992.
The game is played with a dedicated deck derived from the crazy eights family of card games which, in turn, is based on the traditional German game of mau-mau.
History
The game was originally developed in 1971 by Merle Robbins in Reading, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. When his family and friends began to play more and more, he and his family mortgaged their home to raise $8,000 to have 5,000 copies of the game made. He sold it from his barbershop at first, and local businesses began to sell it as well. Robbins later sold the rights to Uno to a group of friends headed by Robert Tezak, a funeral parlor owner in Joliet, Illinois, for $50,000 plus royalties of 10 cents per game. Tezak formed International Games, Inc., to market Uno, with offices behind his funeral parlor. The games were produced by Lewis Saltzman of Saltzman Printers in Maywood, Illinois.
In 1992, International Games became part of the Mattel family of companies.
In 2018, Uno was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame alongside pinball and the Magic 8 Ball.
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This entry incorporates text from “Uno (card game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.