Playing and Then Making: Top Trumps

For a few months now my kids, especially my kindergartener, have been hooked on a card game called Top Trumps. In line with the “learning is inherently social” theme of the week, we play in pairs and as a family, and enjoy it as a way to spend time together AND hopefully hit on some math concepts and strategies along the way. There are a gazillion different Top Trumps decks, but here’s a typical card from one:

Each Top Trumps deck has a theme (in this case, Minions: Despicable Me 3) with a list of theme-specific categories that are listed on each card (here, they’re Courage, Goofiness, Knowledge, Fun, and Top Trumps Rating). Within each deck, cards differ in the number assigned to each of those categories.

To play, each person starts with the same number of cards. The youngest player starts the game, and then the winner of the last round starts each subsequent round. This player looks at the top card in their pile and chooses which category is in play (so here, they might say “Knowledge: 35”). Players reveal the card at the top of their pile, and the one with the highest number in the chosen category wins everyone’s card for that round. The game continues until one player collects all of the cards in the deck.

A great thing about this game is that it teaches the idea of a distribution; in this Minions deck, for example, an 8 is a high Courage rating, but 16 is not a high Goofiness rating. Over time, you learn which category to favor for particular cards, and during a particular game it’s useful to remember who has the top card for particular categories (and when that card is coming up). The more you play with a single deck, the better you get, which proved to be great for my kindergartener who has mastered several decks.

Our first deck was the Despicable Me 3 deck, which forever will have nostalgic value because we played it endlessly on our pre-COVID vacation. I think we can each recite the numbers on each card in our sleep. Since then, winning purchases have included two Harry Potter decks and a Guinness World Records deck (warning: the Most Weight Lifted by Nipples card is really hard to look at). We also got a Wonders of the World deck, which the kids declared was boring/too schooly almost right away-- FAIL!

A fun extension of this is that they each created their own Top Trumps deck. C initiated this (but his deck is still in the works), and E watched closely before quickly following suit. Their decks are totally playable AND will serve as great reminders of their current interests/obsessions. For C, it’s all about the Red Sox and for E, it’s all about Pokemon (his second deck features Sonic the Hedgehog):

I like that for C it has required some thought, baseball card sorting, and internet searching to get good distributions for things like batting average, home runs, RBIs, etc., while also giving his favorite players an edge. I’d say the modification experience has been thumbs up all around, except that I find the f***ing cards everywhere I turn...and I mean everywhere!