The Story of...


The year was 1975, and a 15-year-old Bill Eberle was living in Japan. His father was stationed with the USARJ at Camp Zama, in a suburb of Tokyo. Bill recalls spending endless hours playing a card game that he learned from his fellow Boy Scouts in Troop 409. Named after a small town in Kelantan, Malaysia, that game was Dabong.

Twenty-eight years later, on the shores of Lake Michigan in the Nordhouse Dunes Wilderness, Bill taught two of his best friends, Jim Langeland and Blaine Moore, how to play an early basic version of dabong! They immediately fell for the unorthodox and open nature of the game and started suggesting other potential plays. On a trip to Amsterdam later that year, dabong! began to morph into it’s current form.

New plays were introduced at virtually every sitting of the game. After a poker night, poker plays were added; after a euchre night, the bower power was devised; after playing hearts, the queen of spades (now water) idea came along; after getting a terrible deal, the worst hand rule was invented; and at a New Year's Eve party, the once-a-year rule was created. Some plays were immediate hits, while others (e.g. enhanced limited edition rules) did not work well with the flow of play, and were discarded after trial periods.

Blaine and Jim, both PhD professors at Kalamazoo College, started teaching the game to inquisitive students and soon the game caught on around campus. Poised to introduce dabong! to the world, Bill, Blaine, and Jim teamed up with John Cooper and Kilton Hopkins, entrepreneur students at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. John learned the game several years earlier and recognized the opportunity to create a customized deck to help people more easily learn the game.

Upon considering several ways to organize the suits, the inventors kept coming back to the four elements (earth, air, fire and water), because they are each keen observers of the natural world. With some help from a graphic designer, Cory Cravatta, a unique custom deck was developed.

Their hope is to bring the excitement and fluidity of dabong! to as many people as possible and show you why dabong! is the ultimate card game!

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