Hello. My name is Mike and I am the maker of the Flexdeck. Below is the story behind the cards.

2010-13, after college I lived in Montana and Arizona, hiked regularly, and fell in love with the Grand Canyon. When I moved back closer to home I fell in love again, this time with my wife, Erin. By winter 2016, we were living in Stamford, Connecticut and getting excited about an upcoming trip to Havasu Falls back in the Canyon. I wanted to make sure Erin enjoyed every second of the trip. I started game planning with my best friend Travis ways to make that more likely.

Thinking about the ~25 miles of hiking we had planned, there’s also the part at the campsite, nursing our legs. I started looking for classic games that were light, fun and travel friendly to take with us. Cards, word games and dominoes were the first three on our list among others.

Overall, the options under the ‘travel games’ and ‘camping games’ toy category were miniature versions with small parts and pieces that we’d need to fit in our bags and not lose in the process. These games would take up weight and space that we needed for other gear, food and water, etc.

We started to wonder if there was a single deck of playing cards that combined all of them in one clean design.

This is the part where I went down a deep rabbit hole learning design, researching playing cards, their history and then making and prototyping many different versions of the deck in our kitchen. If these cards are made of anything, they’re made of my wonderful wife’s patience for the ongoing mess I made and how often I talked about the them. I’m not sure she realized what she was getting herself into when she suggested the name.

We play tested with friends, family, and strangers and with their feedback got to bring what became one of our final prototypes to the canyon. We share the different ways we’ve found to play on our website how to play sections because there are so many and there can only fit one extra card in the deck.

To make it something you can get and help feed our now small family (we just had our first daughter summer ‘19!), we worked with the United States Playing Card Company to make sure the cards are made in the U.S.A. and are the top quality that you’re used to playing with in all their cards.

Since we started sharing, we’re so thankful to those of you who read this story, get a deck of your own, leave objective reviews you can and share the fun with your friends and family to do the same.

We love hearing from people who play the Flexdeck, so please share objective reviews where ever you found us and please reach out to me directly on the ‘contact us’ page or at mike@flexdeckplayingcards.com if there’s anyway I can be more helpful.

If you’re about to get a Flexdeck of your own and make us part of some of your future stories, in the sincerest way possible via a website—thank you!