Our Story

We made playing cards personal

Hi, I’m Charlie. This started, like most good card games do, with the people I love.

I grew up playing cards. In my family the obsession is Bridge, a game that looks complicated and sounds stuffy, but get over that first hurdle and you find a game of real depth and fun and teamwork, and it regularly has us playing late into the night. At school and university it was poker, blackjack, Ring of Fire, and a few games with names too rude to print here.

The cards were never really the point. The point was the together: the laughter, the tension, the teamwork, the wind-ups, the highs and the crushing lows. A deck of cards is one of the simplest, cheapest, most reliable ways ever invented to get people round a table and properly with each other.

An old game, ready for a new generation

That matters more than it used to. The pandemic made getting together harder, and a lot of our fun quietly migrated onto screens. But I think there’s a whole younger generation about to rediscover what a deck of cards can do in a room full of friends.

They’d be in good company. People have been gathering around playing cards for the better part of a thousand years. They reached Europe around 1370, survive as Egyptian fragments from the 12th and 13th centuries, and trace all the way back to Tang-dynasty China. We’re just adding a chapter.

It began with a dog in a Fiat 500

The company itself began as a bit of fun. Back in 2023 I started playing with the new wave of AI image tools, not uploading photos but writing scenes and watching them appear. The crazier the better. My favourite to this day: our dog, Nio, cruising around Florence in a little Fiat 500.

Then it clicked

The kings, queens and jacks in a deck of cards are really just a set of portraits, characters that follow a strict set of rules. Get the structure right, I realised, and anyone could be in the artwork. Your family. Your mates. Your team. Your one ridiculous, much-loved dog, eighteen times over.

Built for friends, now open to everyone

I built this through 2025 and launched it in early 2026. At first it was just for friends, and seeing the reaction when someone unwraps a deck full of people they love is genuinely the reason this is now open to everyone.

So, pull up a chair. Let’s deal you in.

— Charlie