Rummikub

Rummikub is a game of 106 flat tiles and four racks. The tiles are small cream-coloured slabs of plastic, each printed with a number from 1 to 13 in one of four colours, black, red, blue and orange, reproducing two packs of playing cards with the court cards turned into numbers. Two more tiles carry a smiling face and serve as jokers. Each player stands fourteen tiles on a long slotted rack, hidden from the others, and tries to empty it by laying runs and groups on the table.

The game was devised by Ephraim Hertzano, a Romanian Jew who sold toothbrushes and cosmetics. The maker's account says he conceived it in Romania as a way round a ban on playing cards; different sources date that invention to the early 1930s, the 1940s and 1951. In Israel, according to his son Micha, he made the first sets by hand with his family in the backyard of their home in Bat Yam, and took six at a time to shops, to be paid only if they sold.

The year on this page is not the year of the first sale. By the family's own accounts the game was on sale in Israel from the early 1950s, and so is older than 1964, but no record dates the first sale. The earliest record checked on an official register is a United States trademark registration, which states that the name was first used on 1 January 1964. The date is therefore marked disputed.

Rummikub reached a wider public in 1977, when the comedian Don Rickles talked about it on The Tonight Show and American orders followed. It won the German Spiel des Jahres in 1980. The family company, Lemada Light Industries, made it for decades at a factory in Arad, and in 2026 sold the rights outside Israel, the United States and Canada to Longshore Limited. The tiles and racks are still the ones Hertzano's trademark described in 1967.