A family card game from Reading, Ohio.

Uno began as a family card game in Reading, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, which runs the National Toy Hall of Fame, tells the story this way: the Robbins family liked to play crazy eights, but the game’s rule variations led to friendly arguments, so Merle Robbins, a barber by trade, marked up a deck with instructions of his own. Play a king and the direction of play reversed; a queen skipped the next player; aces were wild. Writing in Global Toy News in January 2023, Todd Coopee, editor of the toy-history site Toy Tales, dates that new version of the game to 1971.

The family soon decided to have a deck of their own printed. The museum says Robbins and his wife Marie sold their home to pay for the venture, with further money from their son Ray. They called the game “Uno”, the Spanish and Italian word for “one”, after the rule that a player must call out when only one card is left in hand; the museum adds that the rule also meant the name was said again and again during play, much as “bingo” is.

Early sales were local. Robbins sold the decks from his barber shop, and the museum says the couple then bought an old car and a camper trailer, painted signs on its sides and drove south through Texas and Florida, playing and selling the game at campground clubhouses along the way. Back in Ohio, Merle and Ray placed the game in small shops, and stores beyond the state later took it on.

The game’s next owner came from Illinois. The museum describes Bob Tezak of Joliet as an Uno fan who made Robbins an offer to buy it. Coopee wrote in 2023 that Tezak bought the rights a year after the game appeared and formed International Games with two partners, running the business at first from a back room of his flower shop and funeral parlour in Joliet; the museum says Tezak and his small team worked first from their homes and then from a storefront back room.

Red cards, four suits and a red package.

The look players know dates from the International Games years. The Strong museum says Tezak redesigned the game and its instructions into “the familiar red cards and package” that players recognise today. The deck itself works as a small design system. English Wikipedia describes four colour suits — red, yellow, green and blue — each with numbered cards and action cards marked Skip, Reverse and Draw Two, alongside black Wild and Wild Draw Four cards that let a player name the next colour. Colour, number and symbol carry the play, with very little text on the cards themselves.

Tezak’s company also built the brand’s reach. Coopee wrote in 2023 that International Games paired its regional sales effort with appearances on The Bozo Show, the children’s television programme, and then struck a deal that put Uno on the shelves of Walmart and other mass-market retailers.

Later decks have tested how far that system can be redrawn. In early 2020 a concept by the Brazil-based graphic designer Warleson Oliveira, which he called Uno Minimalista, spread online and prompted a fan petition on change.org. Creative Bloq reported in February 2020 that Mattel had taken up the design and shown the cards at the New York Toy Fair, describing a streamlined logo, block colours, reduced symbols, a pared-down box and a dark background on the card backs.

Mattel has also handed the deck to artists. Creative Bloq reported in July 2020 that a deck made with the Keith Haring Foundation was the second in the Uno Artiste Series, after one based on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and that players could match cards by Haring’s artwork as well as by colour or number. The Toy Book reported in December 2020 that the third deck carried artwork by Nina Chanel Abney designed specifically for the game, and that the series had begun the previous September; Coopee lists Takashi Murakami and Shepard Fairey among later artists.

Colour itself has been reworked for access. In September 2017 Mattel announced Uno ColorADD, made with ColorADD, the colour-identification code created by Miguel Neiva; the company said the code’s graphic symbols sit in the top-left and bottom-right corners of each card to identify the four suits. In October 2019 CNN reported that Mattel had released Uno Braille with the National Federation of the Blind, with braille on the corner of each card and on the packaging.

Party games and their owners.

Toy and game packaging does a different job from most retail packaging, because the box is often the first thing a child sees and the last thing an adult reads before buying. Many toys are sold in a window box, a carton with a cut-out panel covered in clear film so that the product itself can be seen on the shelf. Card and party games more often come in a tuck box, a small folded carton with a flap that tucks in at the top, sized to fit in a pocket or a drawer.

Board games and larger toys tend to use a two-piece box with a printed lid, and the lid has long carried photography or illustration of people playing, so that the picture shows how the game or toy is used as much as what is inside. A logo on a toy or game box usually has to work at several sizes: across the front of a lid, along a narrow side panel when the box is stacked, and on the pieces, cards or the product itself.

Each guide that follows looks at how one name has been carried on its boxes, logos and advertising over time, and who has owned that name along the way.

From International Games to Mattel.

International Games did not stay independent. Coopee wrote in Global Toy News in 2023 that Mattel purchased International Games in 1992, taking on the rights to its whole portfolio of games, including Uno and Skip-Bo. The Strong museum’s page on the game gives 1996 as the year Mattel became owner of Uno. Mattel, whose press releases carry an El Segundo, California, dateline, has owned Uno since the 1990s.

Under Mattel the name has been stretched into a family of products. The Strong museum notes licensed and themed versions of the game and dexterity spin-offs, and says that in 2018 Mattel introduced Dos, a companion card game in which players call “Dos” when two cards remain and which uses two central discard piles. The same year, the museum inducted Uno into its National Toy Hall of Fame, in the class of 2018.

For a design guide, Uno shows how a game can carry its identity in a handful of flat colours and one short word. Compare Hot Wheels, another Mattel brand built on a bold colour and a loud logo, and Twister, a party game built on the same four colours. For this guide we use red, yellow, green, blue and black with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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