this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Its actually by design but UNO did not understand this when they copied it, which is why they have expressed to be against house rules. It (no joke) threatens there existence.
If you look up the history of UNO you find it is derived from a cardgame called crazy eights which itself is derived from a german card game called Mau-Mau.
The wikipage for mau-mau even mentiones uno as a proprietary variant.
The killer detail is that almost every nation had its own variant, house rules where a part of games culture.
Its also related to the game Mao which does not have a defined set of rules.
All this to say Uno is not at all a unique game and having variants is part of the natural evolution of this game. The only thing UNO really did was change out the common playing cards to their own graphics and pretended it was a distinct and patentable game.
Oh that's really interesting! Thanks for sharing