Top Trumps

Rules

Top Trumps is a card game. Each card contains a list of numerical data, and the game is played by comparing these numbers. A wide variety of different packs of Top Trumps have been published.

Gameplay

Each pack of Top Trumps is based on a theme, such as cars, aircraft, dinosaurs or characters from a popular film or television series.  The games here are celebrity top trumps and football top trumps. Each card in the pack shows a list of numerical data about the item. For example, in a pack based on cars, each card shows a different model of car, and the data may include its engine size, its weight, its length, and its top speed.

All the cards are dealt among the players. There must be at least two players, and at least one card for each player. The starting player (normally the player sitting on the dealer’s left) selects a category from his or her topmost card and reads out its value. Each other player then reads out the value of the same category from their cards. The best (usually the largest) value wins the “trick”, and the winner takes all the cards of the trick and places them at the bottom of his or her pile. That player then looks at their new topmost card, and chooses the category for the next round.

In the event of a draw, the cards are placed in the centre and a new category is chosen from the next card by the same person as in the previous round. The winner of that round obtains all of the cards in the centre as well as the top card from each player.

Players are eliminated when they lose their last card, and the winner is the player who obtains the whole pack. Some variants of the rules allow ‘three card pick’, whereby a player who has only three cards remaining is allowed to choose any of their three cards to play with. Typically, this lengthens the game considerably.