Falsonal isn't a company, exactly. It's three of us — a designer, a software engineer, and a board-game shop manager — who got tired of saying "we should organise a real UNO tournament one of these days" and finally just did it.
This is the first one we've put on. So if it's a little rough around the edges, that's why. But we've also been planning it for nearly a year, and we've test-run the format with smaller groups four times now, and we feel pretty good about how October 15 is going to land.
How this started
It started, embarrassingly, during a board game night at someone's apartment in De Pijp last summer. We had ten people over, played UNO for about three hours, and at one point someone said "imagine this with a hundred people." Half a bottle of wine later, the idea was a tournament. The next morning we still thought it was a good idea, which is the real test.
From there it was a lot of evenings on someone's kitchen floor with a notebook. Working out the rules. Figuring out how Swiss pairings would translate to UNO (it took longer than you'd think). Calling around to venues. Finding a place that could fit a hundred people, didn't mind a slightly rowdy evening, and was central enough that nobody would have to take three trams to get there.
We landed on Café Checkpoint Charlie, on the Nassaukade. The owners were game from the first email. We're grateful — not every venue understands what "we want a hundred people playing card games here for five hours" means.
Who's behind it
Three people, day jobs in the city, no commercial interest in this whatsoever. We're putting in our own time and a small amount of our own money to make this happen. The free-entry thing is on purpose — we wanted the first event to be open to anyone, regardless of whether they could pay an entry fee.
The sponsors who are helping us cover costs are local — a couple of board game shops, a printer who's doing the participation pins at cost, a coffee roaster who's keeping us caffeinated through the planning phase. We'll list them properly in the lobby on the night. None of them have editorial say in how the tournament is run.
Why Amsterdam
We all live here, mostly. But also: Amsterdam has this weird gap where it has a thriving board-game café scene (Checkpoint Charlie obviously, but also places like Boekhandel Adamant in West and the games corner at Tropen) — and yet there's almost no organised competitive play for casual games. Magic the Gathering, sure. Catan tournaments at gaming conventions, sure. But UNO? A game half the city knows? Nothing. It felt like an obvious gap.
And honestly, an evening in October in Amsterdam is the perfect setting for this kind of event. The weather has just turned, people want to be inside doing something fun, and the city has the kind of pub culture where a five-hour event in a café feels right. New York would be too aggressive about it. Berlin would over-curate it. Amsterdam will just show up and have a good time.
What we're hoping for
Honestly? That a hundred people show up, have a fantastic evening, and want to do this again next year. That's the whole goal. We're not trying to build a brand or grow a business out of this. We just want the event to feel like a thing the city has — like an annual thing where you tell your friend "oh you have to sign up for the UNO tournament next month, it's a whole evening."
If that happens, we'll do it again in 2027. Maybe bigger. Maybe we'll add a second tournament in spring for a different game. We've talked about Skip-Bo. We've talked about Phase 10. Honestly, we've talked about doing one for Mille Bornes, but only one of us actually plays Mille Bornes so we'd need recruits.
One last thing
If you've made it this far down the page — thank you. Genuinely. The fact that someone reads the about page on a one-off tournament website tells us we're probably doing the right thing. We hope you sign up. Reservations are still open.