A Cleveland entrepreneur has a new deal for online and land-based casinos games: “cards” that players can shake, rattle, and roll.
Tom Donelan, CEO and founder of Deck of Dice Gaming, said his company’s patented dice design gives operators a tool to attract new players. “We’ve got a fresh new way to deliver the most familiar game outcomes in history,” he said. “What we can do is create games that depend on the achievements of poker with a much more satisfying frequency of wins.”
Like craps, the company’s “Shake It Up Dice Poker” game uses six-sided dice. Shake It Up uses nine dice, for a total of 54 sides, one for each card in a deck, plus two wilds. The patent specifies which card values are on each die, thereby guaranteeing all straight flushes, quads, full houses and other poker hands are possible without wild cards.
The company recently launched its first full-feature standalone mobile game, a Yahtzee derivative in which players score according to the poker hands they roll. Deck of Dice also has a B2B game licensed to online casino platforms Ruby Seven Studios and BlueBat Games.
Donelan aims for even larger markets. “Our goal is to license versions … in every category of business, from land-based (casinos) to igaming to ilottery,” he says. “Our goal is to cover the Earth when it comes to casual, social, and casino gaming.”
The roots of that lofty dream stretch back more than 20 years to Eldred, Ill., a village with about 200 people, about 70 miles north of St. Louis, Missouri.
“These dice were invented not by a computer engineer, not by a casino game designer, not by a credentialed mathematician, but by a grandmother,” Donelan said.
Her name was Carmelyn Calvert, described in a 2011 Alton (Ill.) Telegraph article as a longtime game fan who thought of putting card values on dice in 1996. Donelan said it took her just one night to figure out how to place each of the 52 playing cards, plus two jokers, onto nine dice to allow all hands in poker, rummy, and other such games. The newspaper reported that she hand-painted small blocks of wood and used them with friends, who encouraged her to market her invention.
That game, Square Shooters, sold regionally at first. In 2010, according to the Telegraph, she signed with Heartland Consumer Products LLC, a Donelan-led firm that manufactured playing cards. A year later, Walmart agreed to sell her game. Calvert died in 2015.
Deck of Dice Gaming owns digital and casino rights to the dice.
Donelan, who calls himself a game lover and strategist, said that like a deck of cards, the dice can be used in a panoply of games. “You can play blackjack or poker. If you want to talk poker, you can play Hold ’Em or Pai Gow. I saw the opportunity to create not just one game, but a business of games, a portfolio of games,” he said.
Recognizing that “Cleveland’s not a hotbed for the casino industry or the game industry,” Donelan went to California and Nevada to recruit experts in those areas.
The company’s chief creative officer is Steve Cartwright, a pioneering designer and producer of more than 50 casual games, including PGA TOUR Pro, EA’s first online sports product, and Aliens, the first video game to use actual movie dialog and cut scenes. The chief technology officer is Andrew Costello, director of online technology for SHFL Entertainment from 2010 to 2014, founder of Bellwether Technologies and co-founder of QBETS Inc. The crew includes a mathematician specializing in gambling games.
“We know how to manage house advantage,” Donelan said.
The use of nine dice gives players a dramatically higher chance of making a top poker hand than a standard deal of cards, so payouts would vary from standard video poker machines to make up for the increased hit frequency.
“We can easily create gambling versions to distribute into the casino market,” Donelan said. “This is a device. It’s a system. It’s the first system since the slot machine was invented a hundred years ago.”
