Taki

Taki comes in a small card box, a deck of 116 cards in two identical halves. Most carry a number from one to nine in one of four colours, drawn as a chunky three-dimensional numeral; the rest are action cards, a red hand for Stop, twisting arrows for Change Direction, a plus, a 2+, a cluster of coloured cubes for Change Colour, a crown for the King, and the TAKI card itself, its four letters stacked in green, red, yellow and blue blocks. Players follow the pile by colour or figure; the first to empty their hand wins.

Its inventor, Haim Shafir, grew up in Haifa and turned from engineering to wooden toys, then games. The rule of shedding cards by matching colour or number came, he has said, from Crazy Eights, played with an ordinary pack; the action cards and most of the rules were his. Shafir Games released Taki at the beginning of 1983, with cards drawn by the illustrator Ari Ron. Its name came from a Japanese woman Shafir met at a fair in Germany; a year later he learnt that the word means waterfall, which suited a card that lets a player pour out every card of one colour.

The game became an Israeli bestseller and was sold abroad. Shafir has adjusted it rather than replaced it: the King arrived later, a +3 card came and went before returning in 2015 with a card that breaks it, and in 2011 the Crazy Card, which forced everyone to pass their hand on, was dropped. A 2018 Ynet poll chose its lettering as the best-loved logo of Israel's first seventy years.

It is still made by his company, renamed the Games of Haim Shafir in 2013, and sold as Super Taki. For the fortieth anniversary in 2023 a green tin edition brought back the original hand-coloured numerals and symbols, redrawn by Yaniv Shimoni. Shafir, now in his seventies, says he still plays his games with his grandchildren.