50 years since the birth of 'UNO', the best-selling game that was born in a barbershop

In 

UNO

all the participants are friends until one of them shouts the name of the game: "One!"

From there, friendships ended.

All the players begin to unleash all their artillery in the form of cards of "suck two", "suck four", "skip the turn" ... It is not a game to strengthen ties, although it is a best seller, with millions of copies sold in The whole world was born thanks to the joint efforts of a whole family: that of Merle Robbins, an American barber of Hungarian origin.

This 2021 marks 50 years since Robbins yelled "one!"

for the first time in history.

The

UNO

is one of the most popular games worldwide table.

According to Mattel (its owner since 1992), it currently sells 17 copies per minute.

50 years ago, however, it didn't get off to an easy start.

He was born at the Robbins family kitchen table in Reading, Ohio, after several discussions playing the crazy eight, a game of mechanics similar to

UNO

that is played with an English deck.

As explained by the page of the National Museum of the Game of the United States, the crazy eight, like many traditional card games, has different variants (known "in my house we play like this") and, to settle the disputes about what each card did , Merle Robbins began to write about them their role in the game and to add more cards with new functions.

click on the photo Part of the report dedicated to Merle Robbins, creator of 'UNO', in the newspaper 'The Cincinnati Enquirer' in 1980. Click on the image to read it in full.

The Robbins' version of the crazy eight turned out to be an entirely new game that triumphed wherever it went.

According to Merle Robbins himself - a barber by profession, who died in 1984 - in a report in

The Cincinnati Enquirer

newspaper

published in 1980, his family began to see the potential of the game after inviting a couple to play

bridge

, which they were also fond of.

When they arrived, instead, Merle and Mary Robbins, his wife, took out the

UNO

.

"We were playing until two in the morning," Robbins recalled.

"They [the guest couple] told us we had to market it, and we started thinking about it."

Producing a board game is not cheap, and

UNO

did not find investors.

"Trying to find funding, the Robbins were always hearing the same story - that it was just one more game out of dozens that appeared each week," says

The Cincinnati Enquirer

.

Finally, they decided to pay for a 10,000 game print run between the Robbins couple, one of their children and their partner.

The design of the letters was commissioned, according to the book

The Hidden History of Cincinnati,

the illustrator Bob Grove.

Grove was known for being the author of the logo for the city's basketball team, the Cincinnati Royals (now called the Sacramento Kings).

To cut costs, the Robbins ordered letters from one printer, boxes from another, and instructions booklets from others.

The 10,000 brochures, 10,000 boxes, and 1,080,000 cards (108 per set) arrived at the Robbins' home, who personally packed them.

In 1971 they began selling the game at Merle Robbins' barbershop for $ 3.

Box of the game of 'UNO' published in 1971. The back of the cards had that green color in the first editions, and not the black we are used to.

From funeral fairs to the world

Merle Robbins tells

The Cincinnati Enquirer

that

she sold

the first

UNO

game

to her friend Andrew Smith, a funeral home owner and card game partner of the Robbins family.

He was also the main broadcaster for the game: “Every week Andy would call me to ask for two dozen games or more,” Robbins explains.

"When I went to conventions or fairs, he would ask me for four to six dozen."

The game began to become popular with word of mouth and to be known outside of Reading thanks to

Andrew Smith's funeral

tours

.

A year after its release, in 1972, the owner of another funeral home decided to buy the game from the Robbins, Robert Tezak.

He did it for $ 50,000 and 10 cents in

royalties

for every

ONE

sold.

Producing the game had cost the Robbins family $ 8,000.

The same day it was sold, Merle Robbins also sold her barbershop and retired.

He was 60 years old.

Tezak tells in an interview with the UPI news agency in 1992 that when he bought

UNO

he had no idea how board games were sold.

"We knew absolutely nothing about the business, we started with a very interesting, but very difficult trial and error process ... And we were very lucky," he acknowledges.

He founded the company Games Inc. to distribute the game and, by 1980, it had already sold more than 15 million copies in the United States, "surpassing

Monopoly

and

Scrabble

in units

," explained

The Cincinnati Enquirer

.

UNO

came to sponsor some cars from popular American NASCAR races. 

Driver Kyle Petty's car in a NASCAR race at the Daytona Circuit in 1982. Brian Cleary (Getty Images)

ONE,

but with hundreds of versions

In 1992, the toymaker Mattel bought Games Inc. and with it all of its games,

ONE

included.

In 1996, in a report in the American newspaper

Living

on

UNO, he

explained that at that time it was already printed in 18 languages, sold in more than 30 countries and more than 120 million copies had been sold.

In addition, Mattel had started to release different versions: the Deluxe edition,

UNO Hearts

(which mixed

UNO

with the hearts card game), an electronic version ...

Varieties of 'UNO' from different decades, from the 70s to the present .. Museum of the United States Game

There are currently more than fifty versions of

UNO published

.

Some include some small changes in the mechanics of the game and others only thematic changes in the card design: there is a

ONE

from

Family Guy

, another from

The Simpsons

… and there is even one from John Deere tractors.

Also last year, and in collaboration with ONCE, the first

UNO

in braille

went on sale

.

This year, Mattel will publish a 50th anniversary edition, with a redesign of the cards with a black background and a new rule.

UNO was

born to settle the disputes that arose with the crazy eight, which was so popular that it had different rules and versions depending on who and where it was played.

Finally, the

same thing happened

to

UNO

: last year, the official profile of the game on Twitter clarified that the cards of +2 (known in Spain as “suck two”) and +4 (“suck four”) were not cumulative.

More than 5,000 responses in a week confirmed that hardly anyone played like this.

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