We bring great card games to the world.

Welcome to Chicago

Chicago is one of those card games that is difficult to explain in one sentence – but very easy to fall in love with once you start playing.

For generations, Chicago has been played around kitchen tables, at summer houses and between friends, particularly in Sweden. It combines poker-style hands with trick-taking, creating a game where luck certainly matters, but where memory, tactics, timing and understanding your opponents can make all the difference.

It is competitive, social, strategic and sometimes wonderfully frustrating.

Despite being familiar to generations of Swedish card players, Chicago has remained something of a Swedish secret.

We want to change that.

Two ideas that became one

The story behind this app actually started from two different directions.

Ola Haraldsson is an experienced IT professional who has spent around two decades working with technology, infrastructure and datacenter environments. Outside his professional life, however, Ola is also something very important for this project: a passionate poker and card-game player.

And like many Swedish card players, he loves Chicago.

On his own initiative, Ola started developing a digital version of the game. He created the first versions of the Chicago app and began testing it with a small group of friends and fellow card players.

It worked. More importantly, it was fun to play.

While Ola was coding and playtesting Chicago, I was approaching the same idea from a completely different direction.

My name is Martin “Franke” von Zweigbergk. I have spent a large part of my professional life around poker, gaming, media and live events. Today I am behind The Festival Series, where one of our ambitions has always been to bring people together through games – not only the biggest and most established ones, but also great games that deserve to be discovered by a wider audience.

Chicago is definitely one of those games.

We brought Chicago into The Festival Bratislava in 2025, introducing this very Swedish game into an international festival environment. I had also been looking for the right app developer to help The Festival create an online tool where we could teach people how to play Chicago.

The idea was simple: if we really want Chicago to become international, we first need to make it easy for people to discover and learn the game.

Then Ola and I found each other.

Combining forces

Instead of starting from zero, Ola already had a functioning Chicago game, experience from real playtesting and, perhaps most importantly, a genuine understanding of card games.

At the same time, I had the ambition to take Chicago outside Sweden and introduce it to the international community around The Festival.

It quickly became obvious that we should combine forces.

We believe we bring together two strong heads, two strong wills and, occasionally, probably two strong opinions – but also two very different sets of experience.

Ola brings the technical knowledge, the coding and the experience of actually building the game from the ground up. I bring my background in poker, gaming, events, communities and introducing different card games to new audiences.

What connects us is perhaps the most important part: we are both card players ourselves.

This isn't a game created by people who simply decided that a card-game app might be a good business idea. It is being built by people who genuinely enjoy sitting down with friends, picking up cards and playing.

Our mission: make Chicago travel

Our ambition with this app is not to replace physical cards.

Quite the opposite.

We want the app to be an easy way to discover Chicago, learn the rules, understand the strategy and start playing. You should be able to enjoy Chicago digitally wherever you are – but we also hope that after learning the game, you will pick up an ordinary deck of cards and teach it to your friends.

We want Chicago to travel beyond Sweden.

We want Finns playing Estonians. Estonians playing Germans. Germans playing Brits. Swedes teaching people from countries where nobody has even heard of Chicago yet.

And then we want everyone to meet around the same tables.

From the app to the European Championship

The next big opportunity to do exactly that will be in Tallinn.

The European Championship in Chicago will be played during The Festival Tallinn, 20–29 November 2026.

One of our biggest goals with this app is to see more nationalities represented in the European Championship. We would love nothing more than to meet players in Tallinn who tell us:

“I had never heard of Chicago. I found the app, learned the game, started playing with my friends – and now I'm here.”

That would mean we have succeeded.

And Chicago is hopefully only the beginning.

Ola and I see this as the start of something bigger. If we can build a great way for people to discover, learn and enjoy Chicago, we want to continue working together on more games in the future – particularly the kind of social, strategic and sometimes overlooked games that deserve a bigger audience.

Our aim is to make them accessible and free to play, allowing more people to discover great card games without barriers.

But first, there is Chicago.

Play it. Learn it. Challenge your friends. Play it digitally. Play it with real cards. Teach somebody from another country.

And if you really fall in love with it, there is a chair waiting for you in Tallinn.

Chicago is ready to travel.

We hope you will help us take it around the world.