Ephraim Hertzano

Ephraim Hertzano was born in Romania in 1912 to a Jewish family and emigrated to Israel, where he was a board-game designer. He devised Rummikub, a tile game that crosses rummy with mahjong, and made the first sets by hand in his back yard in Israel, his family painting the numbers on. The family sold them door to door. It became Israel's best-selling export game, won the Spiel des Jahres in Germany in 1980 and the Spel van het Jaar in the Netherlands in 1983, and is now sold in dozens of countries and played in tournaments worldwide. He died in September 1987.