French Uno was created in the early 2000s in my hometown Triel Sur Seine near Paris, France.
My dad Michel, brother Alexandre and his best friend Arnaud started the tradition of meeting on Saturday afternoons to play various card and board games. They were most of the time in the living room while my mom, sister and I were in the kitchen to bake or gossip. One Saturday, they started playing Uno and it quickly became their favorite card game. They played hours and hours every Saturdays and the more they played the more yelling we could hear from the kitchen.

Because they played so much, they started making their own rules and came up with the idea of doubling down cards.

A few years later, I left Paris for San Francisco, California, met my husband Zeno and when I went back to France to introduce him to my family, guess what game we played? French Uno, of course!

We came back to the USA and one evening, in Oakland California, we joined a table of friends and friends of friends who were playing regular Uno. We told them about the new rules and it quickly became the game of the night!

A few months after that, I introduced French Uno to my coworkers when we had a game night at work. We started playing with 4 players but it quickly became a table of 8. We played from 5:30pm to 8:30pm in our office’s kitchen, non stop and nobody wanted to leave. We had such a great time! That night was the night I decided to create a French Uno website… So there it is a few months later!

Celine, Michel’s daugther – April 2015