Black Spades Creator CJ Peters on Building a Culturally Authentic Card Game, Now Live on Xbox

Ask CJ Peters what Black Spades is, and he’ll correct you before you even finish the question. “There’s no other Spades,” he jokes. “It is Black Spades. That’s the only Spade.” It’s a bit, but it’s also the whole thesis behind the game he’s spent nearly a decade building: a version of spades made by someone who actually plays the way Black people play it, jokers and deuces included, no apologies.

Peters, founder of Konsole Kingz and creator of Black Spades, sat down with The Quintessential Gentleman to talk through the winding path that led him here, and the news that’s finally arrived after years of work: as of July 10, Black Spades is live on Xbox Series X|S, joining its existing home on iOS, Android, and PC.

His background isn’t the typical gaming-founder origin story. Peters came up as a graphic designer, UX designer, and front-end web developer, cutting his teeth at IBM before building websites for David Banner, a connection he made by chance during college.

That work fed into a larger vision: a DVD magazine called Konsole Kingz, built to cover hip-hop and lifestyle content the way outlets like Rewind did, but with one key difference.

“What I had in my magazine that other people didn’t have is I had a video game section,” Peters said. That section became the throughline of his entire career, not because he’d discovered gaming as some new interest, but because he’d been playing since childhood. “I’ve had consoles since I was eight years old,” he said, tracing it back even further to a Magnavox Odyssey 2 his mother bought him.

As DVDs faded and platforms like Xbox Live opened the door to digital content, Peters pivoted into building personalized gaming assets, then partnered with Marcus Matthews of Blue Heat Games, one of the few Black-owned mobile game studios he knew of at the time, to learn the mechanics of actually building games. That education led to the first version of what would become Black Spades: a multiplayer-only card game, originally called Kandi Koated Spades through a partnership with Kandi Burruss, that peaked at #4 in Top Paid iPhone Card Games in 2011.

The game could have ended there. Peters stopped actively supporting it, figuring its run was over, until he noticed unusual activity in the analytics. It turned out players were using the practice mode as a full substitute for multiplayer, because it was the only Spades game on the market that included jokers and deuces.

“There is no other Spades game that had jokers and deuces in all the app stores at that time,” Peters said. That discovery was the spark for rebuilding the game as a true single-player experience, which became Black Spades as it exists today.

Peters was deliberate about the rule set from the start, building around Joker-Joker-Deuce-Deuce, the version he grew up playing, while incorporating regional variations from cities like New York, Chicago, and DC. Bag penalties, Boston rules, misdeals, and renege calls are all built in, along with a detail Peters is especially proud of: in Black Spades, the black cards are the high cards, a small but intentional flip on convention.

“It’s called Black Spades and it’s based on Black people, the way we play,” he said.

The Xbox launch adds real-time voice chat and physical card-slapping mechanics, along with cross-platform reach that now spans Xbox, PC, Android, iOS, and Mac devices with Apple silicon. Multiplayer currently lets friends join the same table together, whether teaming up or competing against each other, bots, or live opponents, with PlayStation next on Peters’ list. “PlayStation has never had a Spades game,” he said. “I wanna be the first to put it on.”

Beyond the platform expansion, Peters has bigger ambitions for what Black Spades becomes long-term. He wants it to serve as a living archive of the game’s rules and traditions, something people can turn to if they never learned to play growing up. He’s already taught in-person classes at conventions like DreamCon and Blaqoutmedia’s programming, and he’s building out a tour of live tournaments, with a stop at XLFest in Chicago.

For Peters, the bigger conversation extends past his own game into representation across the gaming industry as a whole. He’s talked about the gap between Black talent working inside the industry and Black ownership behind it.

“We over-index things, we lead things, we set trends, but we’re not the ones capitalizing off the trends,” he said. His answer isn’t just encouraging more people into tech roles, but building the infrastructure, studios, publishers, ownership that outlasts any one job. “We need Black publishers,” Peters said. “I can’t even tell you one independent Black publisher. I don’t know if that exists.”

With around 300,000 downloads to date and 15,000 to 20,000 monthly players, Black Spades has quietly built a real community, one Peters is still personally part of every week during Making Books Mondays, when he jumps into the game live. Nearly a decade into building it, he’s not slowing down. “I gotta put it on PlayStation next,” he said. “Once I get it on one more platform, that’ll open up some other things.”

Get in the game: download Black Spades now on Xbox, iOS, or Android, and grab the VIP version for an ad-free experience. Check out our full interview below.

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