UNO

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. The aim of the game is to be the first player to score 500 points, achieved (usually over several rounds of play) by being the first to play all of one's own cards and scoring points for the cards still held by the other players.

Uno includes 108 cards: 25 in each of four color suits (red, yellow, green, blue), each suit consisting of one zero, two each of 1 through 9, and two each of the action cards "Skip", "Draw Two", and "Reverse". The deck also contains four "Wild" cards and four "Wild Draw Four". Sets manufactured since 2018 include 112 cards, adding one "Wild Shuffle Hands" and three customizable Wild cards. For each hand, a dealer is determined by having each player randomly draw one card from the deck. The player with the highest number card deals, and all cards are reshuffled into the deck to begin the dealing.