the pointless weblog

The Aliens and Space Warriors top trumps set was released by Waddingtons in 1992. The set contains 30 cards, plus a title card with the rules on the back.

By the 90s, Top Trumps monster artwork had gone into serious decline from their Horror top trumps heydey. This pack of Aliens and Space Warriors was pretty uniformly disappointing. With the incredible Oblit Fet card, though, it was nice to see them keep their tradition of mild copyright infringement going, so it wasn’t all completely bad.

Also at some point between the early 80s and the early 90s, packs of top trumps went from having 32 cards down to having 30. If that terrifying rate of decline has continued, the poor children of today would only get 26 cards in a  pack. It would hardly be worth it.

And I know that the Smet is supposed to basically be a Tribble or whatever, but he really reminds me of a Jib-Jib, possibly the best Fighting Fantasy monster of them all. A Jib-Jib gone all fat and pampered.

These two packs of Horror Top Trumps were produced in the early 80s by Waddingtons. The first pack can be seen here.

I prefer the first pack, really, although this one still has a few absolutely brilliant cards (Death used to haunt my dreams until I was at least 12 or so). It’s just that the first pack seems wildly demented whereas most of this pack is relatively sedate.

These two packs of Horror Top Trumps were produced in the early 80s by Waddingtons. Each set had 32 different cards in it, so when you played with both packs games were guaranteed to last for at least a few days. The second pack can be seen here.

These are undoubtedly the best packs of Top Trumps anyone will ever make. The pictures are all pretty much perfect, the categories and numbers are balanced just about right (although there are a couple of cards that are so weak you can’t ever hope to win with them), and also there is blood everywhere. So much blood.

And of course there’s Godzilla wearing a bowtie.

The Prototypes Top Trumps were one of the original packs that were produced by Dubreq, the company that invented Top Trumps in the 70s. They were eventually bought out by Waddingtons in the early 80s. The pack contained 32 playing cards, as well as the title card, which had the rules on the back.

The cards all featured prototyped cars that weren’t yet in mass-production, and most of which presumably never made it into mass-production, either. There’s some beautiful example of lovely 1970s futurism in the designs. The Pininfarina Modulo appears to have been stolen directly from the ste of Battlestar Galactica.

The worst thing about this pack was the mildly and endlessly infuriating way some of the stats weren’t numerical, causing untold arguments and stalemates. It wasn’t the worst for this but I still cannot forgive it for its crimes.

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The Volg is an exciting science fiction story, written by my older brother in the late 70s or early 80s.

The Volg tells the story of The Volgs, a race of 8ft tall robots made from an indestructable allow, immune to radiation and with caterpillar tracks for feet, were created by the Golvs, blob creatures from a far  distant planet that were intent on taking over the world. Solar System after solar system has fallen to their might, and now only Keg Corburn and Chuck Johnson of the Earth Defense Forces can stand in their way and prevent the subjugation of the human race.

Unfortunately, my brother must have gotten bored and after 20 or so pages of action the whole thing fades out in the middle of a sentence, leaving us with 50 empty pages and then at the end a spaceship design and a couple of stars on fire.

I think he must have written The Volg when he was about 8. I am basing this on the Empire Strikes Back poster he has used as a cover for his notebook. I could be wrong. Unfortunately my brother denied all knowledge of writing any of this, so we will never know for certain. It appears to have been written after watching nothing but Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica for several lifetimes, which probably had some effect on his long term memory.

The most galling thing about all of this obviously is that even at 8 my brother was better at drawing and writing than I’ll ever be.

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