A nickname, an old card game and a little red box.

Skip-Bo is a sequencing card game that began as a small business in Brownfield, Texas. In a report dated 20 July 2018, the Lubbock television station KCBD told the story of Minnie Hazel “Skip” Bowman, a Brownfield woman who used her own nickname to give an old card game a new name and a new box in 1967. English Wikipedia, citing that report, says Bowman began producing a boxed edition of the game under the name SKIP-BO that year.

The game Bowman boxed had a long family tree. English Wikipedia describes Skip-Bo as a commercial version of Spite and Malice, a card game it traces back through Russian Bank, also known as Crapette, to Double Klondike, a two-handed form of patience. German Wikipedia gives the same lineage and records other German names for the game, Pass auf and Asse raus. In play, Wikipedia says, each player works down a face-down stock pile with only its top card showing, holds a hand drawn from a shared pile and keeps personal discard piles, while shared building piles in the middle of the table must start with a 1 or a Skip-Bo card and are cleared away when they reach 12.

KCBD’s report gives a close view of the early boxes. Two Brownfield residents showed the station their original games, each in a little red box with gold lettering reading Skip-Bo on the top. One of them, a box that had passed through four generations of a family, still carried Bowman’s own Brownfield telephone number on the underside, so that a player could call her to buy another. One owner told the station that Bowman was quite the businesswoman and sold the game in bulk to bring in larger vendors.

The station also visited the small building where, it said, Bowman made those early boxes, across the street from the Terry County Courthouse. By 2018 it was a Mexican restaurant, and one resident told KCBD that the restaurant had agreed with Bowman years earlier to leave the name Skip-Bo across the top of the building. KCBD reported that Bowman died in 2001.

German Wikipedia adds a name to the Texas chapter: it says the 1967 game was published by Bowman and produced in Texas by Danny Fuhrmann under the name The Skip-bo Company.

International Games, Mattel and a game sold far beyond Texas.

The game left Brownfield in two steps. English and German Wikipedia both say the rights were bought in 1980 by International Games. A report from the news agency UPI, dated 23 January 1992, describes International Games as a company based in Joliet, Illinois, founded in 1972 by its then chairman, Robert Tezak, and calls it the maker of the card games Uno and Skip-Bo.

That UPI report announced the second step. Mattel, based in Los Angeles, said it had agreed to buy International Games in a stock swap and would run it as a wholly owned subsidiary. Mattel’s chairman and chief executive, John W. Amerman, was quoted as saying that International Games would be the cornerstone on which Mattel would build its games business, and the report said the deal was designed to give a boost to Mattel’s recently established game division. English Wikipedia dates Mattel’s ownership of International Games to 1992, and Mattel has owned Skip-Bo since then.

Outside the United States the game had another publisher for a time. German Wikipedia records a German edition from the publisher Amigo in 1987, followed in 1992 by a German edition from Mattel, and says Mattel has since sold the game in many editions and formats, including compact and deluxe versions.

The cards changed along the way. English Wikipedia says that before 1980 the commercial game was made up of decks of ordinary playing cards, with specially marked SKIP-BO cards standing in for the jokers and some of the low cards in the last deck also marked SKIP-BO. The dedicated deck that followed uses cards numbered from 1 to 12 alongside wild SKIP-BO cards, and Wikipedia says the cards come in blue, green and red. Wikipedia also cites a set of 1967 rules for playing in partnerships, in which a player may use a partner’s stock and discard piles as well as their own while the partner stays silent.

Mattel now describes Skip-Bo on its corporate brand pages as a sequencing card game in which players use skill and strategy to build stacks of ascending numbered cards, with Skip-Bo wild cards that can be played as any number; whoever empties their personal stockpile wins. KCBD reported in 2018 that Mattel had recently introduced an anniversary edition. English Wikipedia also lists a licensed Skip-Bo app on the Apple App Store and Google Play, published by Mattel163.

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 maker’s nickname, a red box and a wild card.

The Skip-Bo identity begins with a name that is also a person. KCBD’s 2018 report explains that the “Skip” in Skip-Bo is Bowman’s own nickname, so the brand has carried its maker in its opening syllable through each change of owner. English Wikipedia writes the name in capitals, SKIP-BO, both for Bowman’s 1967 boxed edition and for the wild cards, so one word labels the game, the box and the card that can stand for any number.

The original packaging was modest and local. The boxes KCBD filmed in Brownfield were small and red, with the name in gold on the lid and the maker’s telephone number on the base, and the building where Bowman made them still carried the Skip-Bo name across its top in 2018, according to the residents the station spoke to.

The brand’s later history runs through Illinois and California rather than Texas. UPI’s 1992 report placed Skip-Bo and Uno together as the card games of International Games, the Joliet company Mattel agreed to buy that January, and German Wikipedia records editions from Amigo and then Mattel for German-speaking players. Mattel’s own description today keeps the core of the game in view: numbered cards played in ascending order and wild Skip-Bo cards that fill the gaps.

For a design guide, Skip-Bo shows how a game named after its maker’s nickname, sold from a small red box in a Texas town, can pass to new owners and keep that nickname as the word on every box and wild card. Compare it with Phase 10, another numbered card game in this group, and Rummikub, a tile game built on runs and sets. For this guide we use box red, lettering gold and card blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Skip-Bo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.