Meet the Founder: Bess Rostowsky, of The Card Room, a modern canasta brand reimagining a family tradition.
Move Over Mahjong? Never. BUT, another game, rich in history, is making a comeback, and we’re here for it. Yes, we play both.
Canasta is a rummy-style card game for two, four, or six players, usually in partnerships. The goal is to build melds, groups of three or more cards of the same rank, with a meld of seven or more called a canasta. Players draw and discard each turn, racing to lay down enough points in melds before going out, while wild cards like jokers and twos add strategy (and plenty of table debate) about when to use them. A round ends when one player melds all their cards, and the partnership with the highest score after several rounds wins.
For Bess, her love of cards is rich with family history. Her grandparents, Blanche and Artie, were married for 75 years and played every week. The cards came out, the table filled up, and the same argument happened every time: was it too risky to open a Joker canasta?
Fast forward to COVID. After binging every reality show, Bess’s parents taught her and her husband canasta. What started as a way to pass the time became a regular ritual, including the occasional mid-game call to 97-year-old Blanche when no one could remember if the threes counted. She knew.
Today the table looks a little different. It’s usually filled with friends squeezed in somewhere between school drop-off and everything else on the calendar. But the cards still felt stuck in another era.
So Bess created The Card Room: a modern take on a classic game, with beautifully designed decks featuring clear point values, acrylic accessories, and a growing collection of colors and prints for every aesthetic.
The game has always been part of the rhythm of Bess’s family, and years later it inspired a brand centered on something increasingly hard to find: uninterrupted time together. THe Card Room is an excuse to slow down, invite friends over, laugh a little louder, and stay a little longer.
Shop playthecardroom.com, follow @playthecardroom, and look out for The Card Room’s monthly local round robins.
