In January 2025, The Washington Post published a profile of an unusual locker-room ritual: the Washington Commanders had picked up a Samoan card game from quarterback Marcus Mariota. The game was Suipi. Suddenly a card game that had lived on Samoan kitchen tables for generations was in the national sports conversation.
What happened
Mariota — born and raised in Honolulu and proudly Samoan — brought Suipi into the Commanders' locker room as a way to pass time, build chemistry, and share a piece of his culture with teammates. The game caught on. Players who had never heard of Suipi a month earlier were dealing hands between practice sessions.
The Washington Post picked up the story in January 2025. The piece highlighted both the card game itself and the cultural moment — Pacific Islander tradition showing up in an NFL locker room, taught by one of the most prominent Samoan athletes in American sports.
Read the original feature: The Washington Post — Commanders card game.
Why this mattered
For most of its history, Suipi has lived inside Samoan households and communities. Friends and family knew it. Outside that circle, almost nobody did.
The Mariota / Commanders moment was the first time the game broke into mainstream American sports media. That mattered because:
- Visibility— Suipi got its name in front of millions of readers who'd never heard of it.
- Respect — the framing treated Suipi as a real game with real cultural significance, not a curiosity.
- Search— for a few weeks, “Samoan card game” was something people Googled. Many of them found their way to playsuipi.com.
About Marcus Mariota
Marcus Mariota is an NFL quarterback who has played for the Tennessee Titans, Las Vegas Raiders, Atlanta Falcons, Philadelphia Eagles, and Washington Commanders. He was the 2014 Heisman Trophy winner and is one of the most accomplished Samoan athletes in American football history. Bringing Suipi into the locker room is consistent with his long-standing commitment to representing Pacific Islander identity through his career.
What is Suipi?
Suipi is a Samoan card game played with a standard 52-card deck. Two players try to capture cards from a shared floor by matching, adding, and grouping values. The player with the most combined points across two games wins.
It's the kind of game that's easy to learn in one hand and impossible to stop playing once you start. Read the full backstory on our History of Suipi page.
Play Suipi yourself
If you read the Washington Post piece and want to try the game, you can play right now — for free, no signup, no download:
And if you want the rules first:
A note on attribution
Suipi is a Samoan card game, not “Mariota's game.” Mariota deserves enormous credit for bringing it to a wider audience, but the game belongs to the Samoan community as a whole. Play Suipi is built to honor that — the rules, the cultural framing, and the family-friendly spirit of the kitchen-table version all come straight from the community that's been playing it for generations.
Take Suipi with you everywhere you go!
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