Maroney Games actually began in 2016 with one mission: to bring families and friends together through fast, fun, unforgettable card games.

Okay, wait.

I'm lying. what happened was this: the children messed up several decks of cards such that we could not play any game...except one. I pieced together several different games to create a version of the card game "speed." We just wanted to play cards, not change the world just yet. As we played our make shift game, it dawned on me that I could make my own game. I wasn't wrong because Mattel had bought Uno around 1980, and Uno was just a glorified version of the conventional card game called "Crazy Eights." Same game, different graphics, modified rules. We did some research. I mean, why would people buy Uno when they can just play Crazy eights, right? It turns out that at the time of my research, Mattel had sold over 150 million decks of Uno. That's a pretty big number, but then, Mattel is a pretty big company. the real metric is how many people played those 150 million games. That is a bigger number.

So I made a couple of prototypes of Turbo-88 with construction paper and played it with friends. Man, they couldn't get enough of the game. They even asked to play when I wasn't around.

So...I started thinking of how I could create more games. After all, Uno revamps Crazy Eights. Phase 10 and Skip-bo revamp Rummy. I ultimately created 15 original game ideas, not yet through theme and art but through numbers, game play, card distribution, and scoring. Theme always came later. of those 15, I created prototypes of around 12 and then reworked some of them several times. My starting premise was to analyze well-love and oft-played conventional card games and then ask which of them are reworkable?

Sidebar: I am always amazed that no matter where I go I see people who create community. They gather, they build, they buy and sell. I don't know why I struggle with understanding how people everywhere find meaning in their lives. I grew up in a tougher world, so...whatever. It doesn't matter. What does matter was that as i created more games with increasingly better materials, I saw people enjoying them, laughing over them, arguing, concentrating, and then playing again and again.

Listen, my math is good on these games. Thanks to Michelle, the graphics are awesome.

Okay, sidebar's over.

The card and board game market is already competitive, and we are disadvantaged in two key areas. First, our means of acquiring and distributing games is through "print on demand" (POD) websites like The Game Crafter, and they are slow...like, really slow, a month slow. That’s not good. Second, POD games cost two to three times what the average game costs on, say, a Walmart shelf. That's not good either.

HOWEVER, all is not lost because our games are fun and they bring value. They provide a welcoming atmosphere for family and friends to gather or counsel one another. Our games are unique. Our games are well thought out and practiced and tested and edited and tested again....

I began to look elsewhere for ideas about a game outside of conventional examples. I came up with a few.

For example, many have tried to bring the theme of basketball to a card game, and they have come up with something that is either too math heavy or too childish; our game Hoops!, Basketball in a Card Game, offers a simple, competitive setting where people may play whole court basketball: centers, power forwards, ALL FIVE POSITIONS!; shots in the paint, mid range, or three land; free throws, referee calls; awesome graphics; and a game that unfolds like the game of basketball. (I also figured out how to put football in a board game. I have the prototype.)

Then there's our game Signum, A Strategic Game of Signed Numbers. Anyone who's ever played the standard card game "Casino" will instantly recognize Signum. Signum is an awesomely fun and repeatable card game with clean graphics and mostly clear rules. Here's a good explanation: Signum is to Casino what Uno is to Crazy Eights. Uno is a good example of how a traditional card game can be repainted and reconfigured to be something that brings joy to millions--tens of millions! But the really striking aspect of Signum is that it has signed numbers, negative 5 to positive 9. Now, it's not just a cool card game but one that can help anyone understand the basics and utility of adding negative and positive integers, which is pretty much everyone on the planet at some point in their lives. I was initially worried that negative integers would be confusing, but the opposite is so: The game is even more fun now. We have another version of Signum called Signum Light. It is geared to expand the number range of the signed numbers (-9 to +20), and it eliminates the Gold, Silver, and Bronze coins that are in its parent game. It's still in beta.

Third, this whole "make card games" idea started 10 years ago with what ultimately came to be known as Turbo-88, the Card Game You Can Race. True to the Maroney Games template, we took a classical card game and made it better. Awesome graphics, better play, fast as a rabbit.

Fourth, another game that family and friends have enjoyed over and over is Link-15, which, like Skip-bo and Phase 10, adds a unique spin to the game Rummy. Link-15 has six colored suits and a wild Link card for each one. The objective is to create as many runs as possible by color and establish a collective run of 1 through 15 all while using the wild Link cards. Another little spin is the fact that the Link cards may be repurposed, stolen, and locked-in.

Next, our first board game came out good. It's an improvement on the game King's Corner, adds two suits while maintaining the binary nature of the game, reworks the game play, and tops it off with some really cute Australian Land and Sea creatures.

We have more to come. They're in the mental queue, and my queue is sometimes slower than The Game Crafter's queue, so please be patient.

Okay, I said all that to say this: yeah, the price is higher; yeah, the print queue is slow; but not everyone is poor and impatient, especially if it means they can provide a platform for people to gather around. I believe that the value and joy that our games bring are worth the higher price as well as the wait.

What started as a small family project quickly grew into a passion for creating games that bring laughter, friendly competition, and the desire to play just one more game.

We like to tell everybody that our games are "designed by family and friends for family and friends" because we enlist our family and friend game playing troops to test all our games. If our customers enjoy playing the game as much as we enjoy putting them through the test phase, that means something good. It means that for every deck that goes out, there's a group of people gathered around to play it and to spend time together. That's good.