Top Trumps
Fight-initiating card game
Top Trumps was an idea so simple, it borders on genius - an adapatation of that schoolboy collector’s perennial, the themed cigarette/bubblegum card, into the world’s piss-easiest card game.
Fifty pee bought you a rounded red plastic box containing thirty-two cards with pictures of warplanes, ships, and racing cars. After dealing them out on the table/playground/bit of waste ground, players would take the top card off their stack, study it with baroque expressions of intensity, before one of them confidently declared “Number of cylinders… eight!” Through such ritual did many a bonding experience occur.
The makers were always keen to hype up the “educational” aspect - never before or since did so many children know the precise dimensions of the HMS Ark Royal - although the basic impulse of the game was less noble - to use that knowledge to get loads of cards off your mates for free. Quirks of the many editions are imprinted on many a memory - one ships edition (“Tonnage… eighteen hundred!”) was, for some reason, printed lengthways. The horror edition (“Fear factor… five!”) showed a bit of imagination, as among the usual suspects (Dracula et al.) was The Incredible Melting Man1 and, er, a maggot. The downside was that the pictures were drawn rather hastily in magic marker. The prehistoric monsters edition fared slightly better, with photos of unconvincing plastic models instead.
The range expanded for the next ten years or so, the originals mutating into Supertrumps (clear, more snazzy boxes, slightly better pictures) when Dubreq was finally consumed by John Waddington in 1982. Celebrity endorsement reared its head (Mike Brearley’s Batting Aces!). Variations like the hopelessly fiddly Minitrumps, and poor rivals like Ace Trump Game, sprang up.
Unfortunately, an escalation in the licensing costs of decent pictures for the cards led Waddington’s to move the ‘Trumps onto the backburner, where they stayed until recent heavily-branded revivals cropped up, although as far as we’re concerned, if the pattern on the back isn’t a white-and-blue image of a racing car, a boat and a plane, it ain’t Top Trumps.
Steve
21 Comments
1 Reference
Email Article to FriendReferences (1)
-
Response: wan accelerationJohn sums up telepresence from a network perspective, \"Telepresence is an interactive real- time application, which means it is delay sensitive, loss sensitive and jitter sensitive. This sounds familiar: it is just like VoIP, with the one difference being that it has huge bandwidth requirements.\" It\'s that last part that makes ...
Except where otherwise noted, this work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Reader Comments (21)
The Baddies were more interesting and were led by Omega from "The Three Doctors". They included the Autons, Silurians, Draconians, Sea Devils, Cybermen and lots more (but I don't think there were any Daleks because of copyright reasons).
Another good one waxs "Marvel Superheros" -Spidereman, Thor, Daredevil etc. versus many villains such as The Wrecker and Stilt Man.
I've still got my horror set -most characters were based on films or at least film poster art. As said, they were gorily but crudely drawn. To be topical King Kong (physical strength 100) was also included. The same company did a "sword and sorcery" type set with similar styled drwaings of elves, dwarfs etc.
I think my favourites included the Dodge Viper (not a lot beat it). I didnt play it enough as a child, and i feel less of a man because of it.
Oh, and there was a rather self-explanatory venture into the grown-up market (and I use the word 'grown-up' with some reluctance) called 'Totty Trumps' that came free with Maxim once.
I've got a set of three decks of Lord of the Rings Topp's Top Trumps now, which well meaning relatives gave me each Christmas the films were out and in which there will undoubtedly nestle cards with Sauron: Evil Factor 99 and Tom Bombadil: Controversially Not Included In The Films Factor 85, or soemthing on them. Needless to say I haven't opened them.
We did try to play with ciggie packs (a slow and painful death beating weakened sperm), but it didn't catch on.
Never understood why Godzilla was dressed in a Ringmaster's costume though, or indeed why a monkey wearing Dr. Strange's amulet was known as the Zetan Warlord.
There was a super-powerful villain called "Prince of Darkness". On account of his tendency to win the holder the game, he was re-christened by my little bruv "Stink of Stinky", an epithet we still use to this day.
There was always one card which you coveted because it was almost unbeatable, and the likelihood was that the player who was dealt that card would ultimately win the game. Usually, there was only one area in which the object on the aforementioned card was weak, and it was pot luck if you happened to pick it's weak point, and wrestle it from your opponent.
The real bizarre thing about this pack was that they'd farted about with the format, having a massive picture on one side and all the data (along with the name in big letters) on the other. This caused a huge problem when playing competitively; what do you reveal to your opponent - the picture, so they can see what you've got, or the writing, so they can read what you've got? Bizarre, and short lived, as all my other packs were more conventional. Ah, the joy of discovering you'd been dealt the B-52 bomber AND the SR-71 Blackbird when playing Military Jets - "ahem, EIGHT jet engines, 56,000kg thrust...!" or "Max. speed, just hand it over..."
Another kick-yourself moment when browsing e-bay. I had the original Marvel ones, complete with white scalloped box, spidey on the backs, and both the horror packs, all fetching what-the-fuck money now. What did I do with them all? Gaah!
The horror ones were indeed weird. One had Dracula on its title card (horror rating - 100!) and the other a sinister hooded figure carrying a scythe. Devil Priest, he was called. Who? I can only assume as earlier posters have said that they were all derived from films, no matter how obscure (I remember the Dracula being very Christopher Lee). But what film portrayed Godzilla as an Iguana in a cravat passed me by.
Other oddities included The Beast (a lime green werewolf) an alien that I'm sure was from '50s B-movie This Island Earth and Zetan Priest, bizarre enough to defy description (although my fevered memory would attempt `cycloptic cauliflower in Ming the Merciless cast-offs'. Oh, and Thor (eh?).
The 'Death' Top Trump was NOT top in all categories (actually only one: 'Horror Rating').
The category you refer to is 'Killing Power' NOT 'Factor'. And the rating was 95, NOT 99.
(cadillac/roller/pontiac)
Still, World class cars had some good pics,though as previously mentioned,your opponant could see them and thus deliver a killer blow! ( again a countach/daytona being stuffed by some yank tank. I see a pattern forming here..... not that I'm bitter..)
Had a few others which had some wierd parings. The record breakers on had Planes. cars, boats, even a helicopter. Pitcing the SR71 against a boat caused much laughs.
i remeber having briefly German cars, god help you if you had the merc 240d and was asked 'acceleration' - 0-60 in over 30 seconds.....
From a car nut point of view, they chucked in some really obsure makes - Monteverdi,Sbarro, Bitter or Bricklin anyone?