Top Trumps with a difference

Top Trumps is a usually a card game. If you haven’t played it before, it is a card game where each card has a set of information on it. Like speed, humour, courage, distance, age etc.

The one player chooses a category, e.g. speed and the person with the highest speed wins all the cards in that round. They then choose the next category on the next round of cards  and so the rounds continue, until one person ends up with either all the cards or if you choose to end the game early, the player with the most cards wins.

The reason I chose to show humour and courage is that each set of Top Trumps differs depending on the pack. We had one with Planes (the movie) and Cars (the movie) which we had been playing and so you didn’t have to have the fastest car or plane to win a round.

Now that I have explained how Top Trumps works in a nutshell…here’s were we played it with a difference.

Top Trumps with REAL planes! Yep! I reckon it was quite a good move even if I say so myself! We often pop in to IWM Duxford as it’s not too far from us. The boys really haven’t understood the concept that it’s not a normal airport yet either and take it for granted that there are Hurricanes and Spitfires and all sorts that fly about there.

They love going into the hangar that has a Concorde in it as it has loads of inside games and we rarely go into the smaller hangars but this time we did. Our 6 year old’s reading has come along so well that he can read most things and this is where the Top Trumps idea came into play.

We each chose a plane and then looked at the information card displayed in front of the plane. The first person chose a category and the other 2 had to locate it on their real plane’s info card and so the REAL Top Trumps game began as we went around the hangar.

Initially some people thought it was a bit weird that there was a shriek of delight out of nowhere, but a couple of them caught on that there was a game going on and slowly their smiles of intrigue showed. We probably should have asked if they wanted to play!

It was a great way of the boys learning about the planes and keeping their attention long enough to hang about and have a nosey around the aircraft.

So, the next time you are out and about and there is a lot of reading to do, I can recommend seeing if it’s possible to play Top Trumps for real!