Ken Johnson, Kmart and a card game built from rummy.

Phase 10 is a card game built on rummy, and its origin is credited to one person: Ken Johnson, a Black game designer from Detroit. The Strong National Museum of Play, which runs the National Toy Hall of Fame, tells his story on its Phase 10 page. Johnson had designed an earlier game, Dice-Baseball, and decided to go into business for himself after he was laid off from a welding job at the Ford Motor Company. He persuaded the retailer Kmart to sell an updated version of Dice-Baseball, but that game fell short of sales expectations.

Johnson then turned to cards. The Strong says he drew on years of playing card games such as rummy, took lessons from the Dice-Baseball experience, and tested prototypes thoroughly to make sure the new game was challenging, easy to learn and viable on a store shelf. In 1982 he convinced Kmart to stock Phase 10. The retailer, the museum says, worried that he would not be able to fill the order, so Johnson gathered the components and, with a group of local teenagers, assembled, packaged and shipped the game from his parents’ basement. Within a year Phase 10 was in Kmart stores across the country and starting to appear at other retailers.

The game’s rules give the brand its name. Players race through a fixed sequence of phases, each calling for a particular combination of cards — sets of matching numbers or runs of consecutive numbers — and nobody can move on to the next phase until the current one is complete. The Strong describes two special cards that shape play: Wild cards, which can stand in for any card in a group, and Skip cards, which force another player to lose a turn. A 2007 press release from Fundex Games and the Canadian developer Magmic credited the game’s creation in 1982 to Kenneth Johnson, described it as based on the rummy variant known as Liverpool Rummy, and noted that it needs its own special deck rather than ordinary playing cards; English Wikipedia describes the same family of games as contract rummy.

For the early years the business was Johnson’s own. The Strong says he personally managed the manufacturing and distribution of the game before licensing it to an Indiana-based publisher, Fundex Games. Those years, built on a single retailer and a family basement, set the pattern for a game sold as a compact deck in a small box, light enough to travel.

Fundex, Mattel and the Hall of Fame.

Fundex Games carried Phase 10 until 2010. A November 2010 announcement by the investment bank Livingstone, which advised Fundex, says the company was founded in 1986 by the game-industry veterans Pete and Chip Voigt, who licensed and launched Phase 10 at Fundex and grew the line through product extensions and wider distribution. Fundex was based near Indianapolis, according to its own website in 2011, and its catalogue ranged from family card and dice games to backyard games and licensed products for brands including Barbie and Hot Wheels.

The Strong dates Phase 10 Dice, which applied the game’s progression of phases to dice rolling, to 1993, and Phase 10 Masters, which let players complete the phases in an order of their own choosing, to 2001. In September 2007 Fundex and Magmic, based in Ottawa, announced a multi-game partnership that brought Phase 10 to mobile phones in North America, with Fundex’s director of marketing, Daniel Sabato, presenting the move as a way to reach a new generation of players.

Ownership changed in 2010. Livingstone’s announcement says Fundex sold certain assets, including the worldwide manufacturing, distribution and marketing rights to the Phase 10 product line, to Mattel; terms were not disclosed. The Strong likewise dates Mattel’s involvement with the game to 2010. Mattel has owned Phase 10 since then. A mobile video game, Phase 10: World Tour, followed in 2019, according to the museum.

Mattel also tied the brand back to its creator. The Strong says that in 2022, for a game anniversary, Mattel released a special edition that included a letter from Ken Johnson, timed to coincide with Black History Month. Two years later, on 12 November 2024 NPR reported that Phase 10 had been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, alongside My Little Pony and Transformers. The Strong’s page on the game records the induction as part of the class of 2024.

Design and documentation.

Card and tile games carry their identity on a small set of objects that players handle again and again. The tuck box or lidded box is the first of them: it sits on a shop shelf, then on a home shelf, and its name panel, colours and illustration have to be recognisable from the spine as well as the front. A game’s name is often drawn as custom lettering rather than set in a stock typeface, and the same lettering may be redrawn when a publisher refreshes the range.

The card face is the second. Numbers, symbols and colours have to read quickly across a table, in low light and upside down, so a card’s layout tends to change slowly even when the box around it is redesigned. Card backs, by contrast, are where a brand’s pattern or mark can repeat across every card in the deck.

The third is the component that sits in front of each player — a tile rack, a tray or a board — whose shape and material can become as familiar as the name. Each guide looks at how these pieces have changed under successive owners, and at what the sources say about who designed them.

A name that is also the rulebook.

The name Phase 10 tells a new player what the game is — a progression through numbered phases — and every printed card in the deck supports that idea, from the numbered cards used to build sets and runs to the Wild and Skip cards that bend the sequence. The Strong’s account stresses the same qualities in the product itself: a game that is challenging yet easy to learn, and a deck small enough to take along when visiting friends and family or travelling.

The brand’s design history is a history of owners and formats. Johnson and a group of local teenagers packed and shipped the early copies; Fundex later took over the game, and the line widened with a dice game, a Masters edition and, in 2007, a mobile version; and since 2010 Mattel has published the card game and its anniversary edition, with the World Tour app following in 2019. Each step carried the same name and the same idea of a sequence of phases to new formats.

The creator’s story has become part of the identity too. Mattel’s anniversary edition carried a letter from Ken Johnson, and the National Toy Hall of Fame tells the game’s history through his biography, from the Ford welding job to the Detroit basement and the Kmart order. That narrative gives the brand a named author.

For a design guide, Phase 10 shows how a product name can double as a rule and a promise — a numbered goal printed on every box, supported by a deck of numbered cards and a pair of special cards. Compare it with Skip-Bo, another family card game, and Barbie, a Mattel brand Fundex also produced licensed games for. For this guide we use phase red, card blue, run green and set yellow on card white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Phase 10’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.