These are two sets of footballers top trumps from about 1980. The players are mostly from the the old English First Division, with a few high profile British footballers that played abroad thrown in, too. And Stan Bowles. There were 32 cards in each pack.
These packs have been so thoroughly mixed up over the years that I can’t tell you which cards were in which pack, I’m afraid, and I’ve lost the title cards and the rules. Now we’ll never know how to play.
I am truly sorry.
This pack of Top Trumps were released in 1992 by Waddingtons. There are 30 cards in the set. It is the third pack in a loosely linked set along with Dragons and Magic Beasts and Aliens and Space Warriors.
If you really wanted to, you could combine all three packs into one really massive top trumps pack (as long as you didn’t mind equating Intelligence with Magical Power). I assume if you did this the game would never ever end at any point.
This pack of Top Trumps were released in 1992 by Waddingtons. There are 30 cards in the set.
This pack was part of the same series as the Aliens and Space Monsters set. There was also a third set in the series, Goblins and Faeriefolk, which is probably the best of the lot, due to having a witch in it.
I think the best card in this set is probably Barad the incredibly smug Minotaur.
Also in this pack (and in most of the other packs from the early 90s), there is a card that’s just an advert for subbuteo.
There’s also a card that allows you to claim a free pack if you have enough of them, but I don’t think we ever did. Or, at least, if we did we never sent them off.
Also I’ve only just noticed that by the 90s they weren’t even Top Trumps anymore but Super Top Trumps.
Spacecraft Top Trumps were another Waddingtons pack from the late 70s or early 80s. There were 32 cards in the set.
This was another of our favourite packs of top trumps. It’s a fairly incongruous collection of real world spaceships, famous UFO photos, excellent science fiction illustrations, and solen photos of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica spaceships renamed and reappropriated.
The Centaurus spaceship was drawn by Chris Foss. I’ve seen a different coloured version of that image used on a book cover before. I don’t know who any of the other illustrators are, though.
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.
