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).