Card & Board Games: San Martini Favorites

Card & Board Games: San Martini Favorites

A deck of cards. A folding board. A few good people, some cocktails, snacks, and who have nowhere better to be, killing time. That is the entire recipe, and it has not changed in four thousand years.

Ancient Mesopotamia, someone rolled dice across a board carved from wood and shell and had a genuinely good night. Communist Romania, a toothbrush salesman got tired of the government telling him he could not play cards, so he built an entirely new game out of airplane windshields. Birmingham during the London Blitz, a piano player sat in the dark waiting for the bombs to stop and invented a murder mystery instead.

These are not just games. They are what people build when they refuse to let the world take the evening away from them. Here are fourteen of our favorites, the history behind each one, and why they still earn a place on the table.

Rummikub

Picture a balcony in Tel Aviv. Watermelon on a plate. The clack of tiles hitting a wooden rack. That sound is the whole story.

Rummikub was invented by Ephraim Hertzano, a Romanian-born Jew who sold toothbrushes and cosmetics for a living. When the Communist regime in Romania outlawed card playing as gambling, he wanted a legal way to keep playing rummy anyway. So he swapped cards for tiles, sourcing the plastic from a shop that recycled old airplane cockpit windows into toothbrushes. The first rummy tile in history was born the next day, made from the same material that once kept a pilot's windshield intact.

Hertzano emigrated to Israel after the war and handcrafted the first sets himself in his backyard, painting each tile, selling them door to door. It became Israel's best-selling export game. The American breakthrough came when comedian Don Rickles toured Israel, fell hard for it, and went on television describing how he and his wife skipped meals just to keep playing. Orders poured in. Rummikub has since sold more than 50 million copies worldwide and remains a genuine staple of family game night, tile by satisfying tile.

Tripoley

The red plaid box. The circular felt mat. Chips stacked neatly on the King, Queen, and Jack of hearts. If you grew up in America in the last seventy years, there is a real chance this was your first card game.

Tripoley combines Hearts, Poker, and a rummy variant called Michigan, all played on a special layout with poker chips, essentially a commercial cousin of the old European game Poch. It debuted in 1936 for Cadaco, a Chicago company whose name is simply an acronym for its founders, Charles and Don and Company. Billed as "The Game of Kings and Queens," it even had a small wartime service edition for soldiers overseas. Three generations of American families will tell you the same thing: this was the first game anyone ever taught them to play.

Parlay

Now for something built for right now. Parlay is a modern betting-and-racing card game wrapped entirely in 1920s speakeasy style, sourced directly from playparlay.co. Players place bets with numbered tickets and race weighty gold metal pawns around a track using a hand-painted 62-card deck. First across the finish line wins.

This is a game designed for people who care how the table looks while they play. The box comes with a QR code that launches a curated jazz playlist and a suggested cocktail and snack pairing. The pieces are real metal, heavier than they need to be, exactly the way a good object should feel in your hand. It is, quite simply, one of the best modern games for a dinner party that wants to look as good as it plays.

La Corsa

La Corsa means "the race" in Italian, and the entire game is a love letter to 1960s Grand Prix racing, sourced from lacorsagame.com. Designed by a transportation designer with a genuine feel for vintage motorsport, it uses a 78-card deck across six suits to move injection-molded race cars, painted in Italian racing red, British racing green, and racing white, around a folding beechwood board with checkerboard inlays.

The mechanics borrow from the old card game War: the car in last place challenges the car ahead, and the higher card advances. Play seven races, score with a genuine vintage Formula One points system, and the driver with the most points at the end wins. It plays in under an hour and looks, quite frankly, like a piece of art left out on the coffee table.

Monopoly

Here is the great American origin lie, corrected. The story printed inside the box for decades: an unemployed Depression-era salesman named Charles Darrow invents Monopoly in his basement and becomes the first millionaire game designer.

The truth is more interesting and considerably less fair. The game descends directly from The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, a progressive writer who designed it specifically as a critique of monopolists like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Her game spread through Quaker communities and East Coast campuses, was modified along the way with Atlantic City street names, and eventually reached Darrow through a chain of dinner parties. Parker Brothers bought Magie's patent rights in 1935 for 500 dollars and no royalties, then promoted Darrow as the sole inventor. The truth only surfaced decades later during a lawsuit.

More than 275 million copies have sold since 1935, in over 100 countries. And the best wartime trivia in this entire list belongs here: during World War II, British intelligence worked with a UK game manufacturer to hide silk escape maps, compasses, and real currency inside Monopoly sets smuggled into German POW camps disguised as charity donations. A tiny red dot on the Free Parking space marked the rigged boards.

Clue

A murder in a mansion, born during an actual air raid. Clue, known as Cluedo in the UK, was devised in 1943 by Anthony Pratt, an English musician who played piano at posh country-house parties and loved detective fiction. Holed up during wartime blackouts in Birmingham, he and his wife Elva, who designed the board, built a deduction game originally called simply "Murder!" Material shortages after the war delayed production until 1949.

Pratt's own reward was thin. He sold the overseas rights in 1953 for a modest sum and returned to work as a solicitor's clerk. The company only discovered he had died when they went looking for him to celebrate the game's 150 millionth sale. The 1985 film adaptation, famous for its three different endings shown at different theaters, flopped on release before becoming a cult classic once home video stitched all three together. Clue remains one of the most beloved deduction games ever made, precisely because everyone at the table becomes a slightly different kind of liar.

Pinochle

The firehouse game. The beer-garden game. The game German immigrants carried across the Atlantic in the mid-1800s and quietly made American.

Pinochle descends from the French game bezique and the German variant Binokel, popular in Württemberg and Bavaria. German immigrants planted it firmly in Midwestern and Northeastern communities, in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. Here is the twist worth knowing: pinochle was one of America's most popular card games around World War I, and anti-German sentiment during the war actually helped it spread, because Americans simply stripped away its German identity and claimed it as entirely their own. It survives today in firehouses and police stations, where long shifts and long friendships keep the deck warm.

Gin Rummy

The two-people-at-a-bar game. Fast, sharp, a little bit dangerous if you are playing for anything at all.

Gin Rummy was invented in 1909 by a whist teacher named Elwood T. Baker and his son, who went on to become a Hollywood screenwriter, at a private club in New York. Their innovation was the "knock," letting a player end a hand once their unmatched cards totaled ten points or fewer, rather than forcing a complete meld. That single rule turned a slow game into a tense, strategic duel. Hollywood adopted it in the 1930s and 40s, with stars playing between takes on set, and American soldiers carried it overseas during the war. It remains the definitive answer to the question of what two people order to go with their second round.

Rummy

The whole family tree. One of the most popular card game families on the planet, and the ancestor of half the games on this list.

Rummy's origins are genuinely disputed between Mexican and Chinese roots, with one leading theory tracing it through the Mexican game Conquian and another through a Chinese, mahjong-adjacent game called Khanhoo. From that single root grew gin rummy, five hundred rum, canasta, and a hundred household variants passed down by whoever taught you first.

For a beautifully made set that will outlast every plastic deck you have ever owned, the Game Night Box with dice and playing cards, handcrafted in wood, is exactly the kind of object worth leaving out on a shelf between games, not shoved in a drawer.

Spoons

Chaos with cutlery. The game where a genteel table turns, in about four seconds, into a full-contact sport.

Spoons is a fast four-of-a-kind grabbing game, a variant of the older games Pig and Donkey. Cards pass quickly around the table, and the moment a player collects four of a kind, they quietly reach for a spoon from the center pile, always one fewer than the number of players. Once one spoon moves, everyone dives. It became a dorm room and family reunion staple because the rules take thirty seconds to explain and the drama lasts considerably longer.

Cribbage

One of the oldest card games still in regular play anywhere, and the undisputed game of the submarine service.

Cribbage was invented by the English poet and gambler Sir John Suckling in the early 1600s. It uses a pegged board to track scoring, an unusual and satisfying mechanic that makes it as much a physical object as a card game. The Navy connection is the best story here. Cribbage is the unofficial game of the US Submarine Force, and aboard the USS Wahoo in 1943, a commander dealt his executive officer a perfect cribbage hand of 29, the highest possible score, with odds of roughly one in 216,580. The crew took it as an omen. The ship sank two enemy freighters the very next day.

For a game this old, the board itself deserves to be beautiful. The handmade wood cribbage board is the kind of piece that turns a quiet evening into a small ritual, exactly the way a three-hundred-year-old game deserves.

Backgammon

The oldest board game still played in its original spirit, and the definitive game of the café table, the Mediterranean afternoon, and the sophisticated player who has nowhere urgent to be.

Backgammon's oldest known ancestor is the Royal Game of Ur, with boards dated as far back as 2600 BCE, excavated in Iraq in the 1920s. The line runs through Roman dice games and the Persian game nard before arriving at the modern rules codified in England in 1743. The single biggest innovation, the doubling cube, was introduced in New York City gaming clubs in the 1920s and transformed backgammon from a simple race into a genuine game of psychology and risk. It exploded again in the 1970s as the game of the international jet set, played in Riviera beach clubs and Hollywood living rooms alike, and it remains deeply woven into Middle Eastern and Mediterranean social life today.

A game this elegant deserves a set you actually want to carry with you. The mini backgammon travel set, handcrafted in wood, folds small enough for a weekend bag and looks exactly as good open on a café table in Cannes as it does on your own coffee table.

Dominoes

From Song Dynasty China to the cafés of Italy to the parks of Havana, dominoes have traveled further than almost any game on this list.

The earliest recorded mention comes from thirteenth-century China, where sets of 32 tiles represented every possible throw of two dice. The European version appeared later, in Italy in the early 1700s, adding the blank faces the Chinese sets never had, then spread through France, Austria, and eventually England, reportedly carried by French prisoners of war. Dominoes became a coffee-house staple in the 1700s and 1800s and later a genuine cornerstone of daily social life across Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, where a set and a folding table outside someone's front door is still a completely normal Tuesday evening.

The Domino Family Fun wooden game set, handmade, brings that same warmth to your own table, built to be handled for years rather than replaced in a season.

Chinese Checkers

The great naming swindle of the board game world. It is not Chinese. It is not checkers.

The game was invented in Germany in 1892 under the name Stern-Halma, "star Halma," a variation of an American game called Halma that simply swapped the square board for a six-pointed star. The "Chinese" label was pure American marketing when the game arrived in the United States in the late 1920s, sold as "a game from the Orient" to give it an exotic mystique it had never actually earned. There is no connection to China whatsoever, and the game remains one of the most purely accessible tabletop experiences ever made: no reading required, single-step moves, and a six-year-old and a grandparent can play it together at full speed.

The Star Checkers game captures exactly that spirit, simple enough for the youngest player at the table and satisfying enough that the adults keep asking for one more round.

The One Rule That Matters

None of these games require a screen. None of them require an internet connection, a subscription, or a charging cable. They require a table, a few hours you were not otherwise using, and people willing to sit across from each other long enough to actually talk.

That is increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable. Build a shelf of a few of these, wood over plastic where you can manage it, and you will notice something over time: the games do not wear out. They get better. The backgammon board picks up the memory of every match played on it. The cribbage pegs wear smooth in exactly the spots your fingers keep returning to.

Pick one tonight. Deal the cards, or set the tiles, or fold out the board. See who is still at the table when the last hand is played.

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