Make your own Top Trumps

Posted on October 4, 2007
Filed Under Free, Games |

My children really enjoy a good game of TopTrumps. For those of you who haven’t heard of it – it is explained in Wikipedia. Even before they could read the cards my children would say things like “the one at the bottom – a 2 and a 0” They liked that they could play a ‘proper’ game, and I liked that they were using numbers a lot and deciding which number was the greater. But there is quite a limited range of the cards for smaller children so we decided to make our own. And they loved it!! Some games we have made include Wild Animals, Cars, Machines (trucks, bulldozers, areoplanes and the Hubble telescope were included), Insects and Dog breeds (although Top Trumps have their own version of this now!)

The fun part is choosing the pictures – we search for images on google or from abc-kid. We usually just print them on paper, then cut them out and glue them onto old playing cards. The difficult part is collecting together the statistics needed. We started with just three easy statistics per card – usually something that we could make up. Size, Speed, and Danger were initial favorites and we just marked them out of 10 (with, for example, a snail being the slowest so getting a 1, and cheetah being the fastest and getting 10). This can make an unbalanced set of cards, with some cards ALWAYS winning and others ALWAYS losing – but the children were so pleased at being able to play a game that they had made, that they never seemed to mind. Lately our packs have used 5 categories and we have done more internet research to find correct statistics (Age, weight and length for example, are usually easy to find).

Comments

7 Responses to “Make your own Top Trumps”

  1. Sonya Chappell on November 16th, 2007 5:57 pm

    Thanks for suggesting this. Catherine was not in the best of moods this week as she had a bad cold but she really got into this idea; two days later we have 25 Birds top trumps and William has made 15 Fish ones. I think they both enjoyed the killer rating best!

  2. admin on November 16th, 2007 7:26 pm

    Hi Sonya - Thanks for the comment. Glad the children enjoyed it. Julie.

  3. games, links on April 8th, 2008 8:00 am

    […] you enjoyed making your own top trumps game then you may be interested in this neat way to make a trading […]

  4. alex on May 2nd, 2008 8:14 am

    cool

  5. Billy on June 8th, 2008 8:32 pm

    fun

  6. charlie on September 4th, 2008 7:25 pm

    Im only 10 but i tried making my own like you and know Im the biggest news in school. I hope your kids carry on playing them because they are so much fun and easy to make. in my school they’re so cool that the teacher, Mr.Rollands lets us play with them for an hour. he calls it card hour.

  7. admin on September 4th, 2008 8:59 pm

    Wow Charlie - good for you.
    Mr Rollands sounds pretty cool too!

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