yesterday's pokekon (Top Trumps)

Member Name: sweetlady

Product:	Top Trumps
Date:	10/09/01 (772 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They were educational and came with free carry cases

Disadvantages: I suppose there could have been a compulsion to collect

Can You remember SuperCars? Fighters and Bombers? World Cup 78? Battleships? World Record holders? Top Trumps were all the rage when I was about 9 years old - although I did have a few games in my 20's for old times sake :-)

The rules were simple. You had a deck of about 36 cards and you dealt them out evenly between however many players there were and you turned up the top card without seeing any others and one person read out a value (e.g. "33 knots" in the case of the Franklin D Roosevelt Aircraft carrier) and whoever had the highest value for that category took the rest of the cards played in that round, put them to the bottom of his/her pack, turned over the top card and chose a category. The winner being the one who had all the cards at the end.

The games used to last typically 20 minutes and it was quite a bit of fun for poeple who knew the deck well.

Comparing Top Trumps to the Pokemon:

The packs were sold as complete entities and couldn't be combined in any way.

The rules were easy - so easy that My Grandmother could play the game.

The packs weren't often traded and there was no Gotta catch 'em all.

They dealt with real life subject matter (mostly) so were educational.

Just like pokemon there were "clones" which were games made very similar to the original Top Trumps but were still quite playable games - "Ace Trumps" springs to mind.

I don't believe they were as expensive as today's pokemon but if you consider that you didn't need to collect more and more to play I guess it was cheaper.

Each pack of Top Trumps came with a durable free carry case.

Please post replies listing the different packs available as I would like a little nostalgia. I gave all mine away and can't remember the packs available.

Summary: