In this post we will show you how to design and make your very own homemade top trumps game!

What you need

1. A theme for your game. This will be something that all your cards will share in common. Examples include:
   • Animals
   • TV / Book Characters
   • Dinosaurs
   • Fruit
2. Categories for your cards. These are the attributes of your cards and will be used to play cards against each other. For example, if your theme was Animals, you might choose:
   • Size
   • Speed
   • Strength
   • Cuddliness
3. A few sheets of paper. These are used to create the fronts of your cards.
4. Some cardboard. For example, a cereal box.
5. A scissors. Maybe a small one for you to cut the paper and a bigger and sharper one for a grown-up to help you cut the cardboard.
6. Either a pencil and some colouring pencils if you’re in the mood for art or a computer and a printer if you’re feeling more technological.
7. Some glue to affix the paper to the card.

Steps

Having decide on a theme and your card categories, you first decide how many cards you want and how many categories each card has. We find that 20 cards and 4 or 5 categories works well. You may then want to create a table listing all your cards and their attributes. This way, you will have everything ready to go and can decide who will be the highest in each category. You can also make changes if you change your mind! For example:

Next, we will make the cards. The easiest way to do this is simply to take a standard playing card and trace its outline on both your sheet of paper and your cardboard. Alternatively, if you’re using your computer, you could measure the playing card to create a template. Feel free to download the handy Word template that Michael created for some insects. Here is a printed Mr Men sheet ready to go!

If you are using the template, you can snip an image from the internet or leave that area blank to draw your own picture.

When you have your paper and your card ready to go, you will glue them together. STOP! Before gluing the paper to the card, make sure that you do so in such a way that each card has the same back. If you’re using a cereal box for your cardboard, you will want to stick the paper to the outside of the box so that the backs of the card look like so:

Now you should have everything ready to go!

Samples

Here are some we made earlier!