Our Story
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Hi there! 👋 I’m Maayan. I’m 16 years old and live in Jerusalem, Israel.
Queeng Playing Cards is a project that my father and I started on a family vacation 4 years ago.
We were relaxing by playing a game of gin rummy when I turned to my dad and asked “Why is the queen card worth less than the king?”
It was an innocent question, but when my dad couldn't come up with a good enough answer, we decided to do something about it. I created a new card system where the kings and queens are equal, but we still end up with a winner. We swapped two jacks for lovely princesses and designed a female joker, and it was incredibly successful!
In just one year...
We've sold more than 50,000 decks of the first edition of Queeng to 15,000 backers all over the world! My dad helped me execute the whole project with some business advice and constant mentorship.
Though we got a lot of great feedback, we also heard from some supporters that our cards were not actually totally equal. I realized that a diversified representation of ethnicities wasn’t there, like it doesn't exist. This doesn’t actually represent the people of the world as we really are, and if we are going to give these cards to kids to hold in their hands and play with, don't we want them to see an accurate depiction of the world?!
So we went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. We wanted to make a deck that truly represents our world and celebrates our beautiful range of cultures and appearances!
I created the first ever multi-ethnic deck of cards, where, once again, men and women are equal but now with more colors and characteristics.
Queeng is an updated version of the classic deck of playing cards, but still works with ALL the original principles, so you can play ANY card game with it.
With its attention to detail and gorgeous, hand-drawn illustrations, each deck is as special as the encouraging message it brings to the world ❤