Ring in the Holidays with Top Trumps

Top Trumps have been huge over in England for decades and are now here in the United States. Recently, I had the pleasure of chatting with some of the Top Trumps family at Toy Fair in Chicago. Hearing about how generations upon generations have grown up loving and playing Top Trumps made me want to take a closer look. There seems to be so much love for this company and their games that I couldn’t wait to play them with Peyton.

Top Trump Card Games

Their most popular, noteworthy game, are their card games. We tried out Who is the Most Mischevious? Cats and Baby Animals. Each deck contains 30 cards filled with fun facts and different ratings. You can play with 2 – 6 players and is recommended for ages 6 years old and up.

Now, playing it does take a hand or two to get a hang of it. After you shuffle the cards you deal them all out to the players, face down. Each playing picks up their cards but can only look at the top card. You are not supposed to sort them or rearrange them, just pick them up in the order they were dealt. When it’s your turn, you look at your top card and you pick a trait/quality and read it out loud. Everyone has to read the same trait/quality. Whoever has the highest value get to keep all the cards for the hand. It’s a ton of fun and you learn a lot while playing.

There are dozens of different decks to chose from, including a whole series on Harry Potter and Star Wars! Did you know that J.K. Rowling grew up playing Top Trumps and helped create the Harry Potter series? How cool is that?

The Crazy Cube Game – Despicable ME 3

Another fun game is The Crazy Cube Game. It’s a matching game and can be played with 2 players, suggested ages are 4 years old and up. Now, this game looked complicated to me at first glance but it’s not, it’s really fun! Follow the directions to set up the board, shuffle the cards and deal 2 cards to each player face down. No one can look at the cards. Then start trying to make your match by taking turns pushing out different cubes until someone has 5 in a row. You cannot push out the same cube more than once.

But here’s where it gets interesting, when someone has a match, the other player gets to flip over their cards. If one of their cards is a match for the 5 matching cubes then they steal the match and win the game! It literally comes down to the last few seconds of the game to see who the winner is.