Uno was created by Merle Robbins, a barber from Reading, Ohio, in 1971.

Quick Scoop: Who Created UNO?

  • The card game UNO was invented by Merle Robbins, an American barber who loved playing card games with his family.
  • He designed UNO as a twist on the classic game Crazy Eights to stop recurring arguments over the rules.
  • Robbins and his family initially printed about 5,000 decks and sold them out of his barbershop and to local shops, before the game later grew into a global hit.

A Tiny Bit of Story

Robbins’ idea started as a homemade solution: he customized a deck so that the rules were printed into the gameplay itself, using colors, numbers, and special action cards like skip and reverse.

The name “UNO” comes from the moment when a player has only one card left and must call out “uno,” matching the Spanish and Italian word for “one.”

TL;DR: UNO was created in 1971 by Merle Robbins, a barber from Reading, Ohio, who turned a family house-rule fix for Crazy Eights into one of the world’s most popular card games.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.