Clever
Playing
Cards
Bringing family and friends together through games.
Hi! We're Maxine and Randy Ekl, co-founders of Clever Playing Cards. Here are a few
highlights of our journey as card / board game designers.
We self published Think Ahead and High And Low Poker in 2010 based on Randy's idea for
Dual Value Playing Cards.
In 2013, looking to expand the distribution of our card games, Maxine attended theInventor Conferences at ChiTag.
She was given invaluable advice about our card games specifically and the game industry in general. This in turn led to our decision to change our business model
from self-publishing to a licensing format. It also led to the creation of a new card game - Stripes.
In 2015, we attended our first
Protospiel in Milwaukee to play testStripes.
Not only were we given top notch advice on makingStripes better,
we also found a generous, welcoming community of game developers.
Later that year, Maxine returned to ChiTag and participated in a "speed dating" event to pitchStripes. It was there that she met
Shari Spiro of Breaking Games. Shari loved it and licensed it a few short months later.
We couldn't understand why there wasn't a Protospiel in Chicago, so Maxine decided to organize one.
The firstProtospiel-Chicago
took place in September of 2016. It was a great success with over 100 people attending.
In early 2019,Stripes became available
atfor sale online at Breaking Games.
We couldn't be more excited about the release of our latest game!
Over the last several years, we've continued to hold Protospiel Chicago's, and 2024 will be the 8th!
We continue to design and develop and playtest games, and pitch to companies, with Dice and Slice picked up by ThinkFUN, and another game (secret for now) picked up by a company (secret for now),
scheduled for release in Summer 2024.
That's our story so far. Follow us on social media (see below) to see what we do next!