Top Trumps Kings and Queens Classic Card Game, play with 30 Kings and Queens including Queen Elizabeth II and Charles I, gift for ages 6 plus

A good quality top trumps game

I was inspired to buy this set by a free sample card that I found inside a Monopoly game - the "Kings and Queens" edition. That was clever advertising! This would be an ideal, inexpensive gift for history fans. It is also very educational.

My daughter’s got a strong interest in history and this seemed like a fun new version of Top Trumps that might be a little bit educational, as well as tallying with what she already knows from Horrible Histories and beyond. And yes, it is a little bit educational- there’s a paragraph on each monarch which might, possibly, tell you something you didn’t already know, but even my primary school age daughter already knew pretty much all of it. It’s very much a ‘King’s coronation product’ and the figures in it are 2023 figures, showing King Charles’ reign as 0 years and so on, which gives the set a slight longevity problem. It feels a bit odd, and somewhat sycophantic, to include Camilla, William and George in the set, when they’re using up spaces that could have been better spent digging up some other lesser-known monarchs from history. Putting aside the alive-in-2023 entries, most of the other monarchs depicted here are the “greatest hits” of the UK’s royal history- Henry VIII, William the Conqueror, Henry V and so on. As a result many of the info panels contain info that even people who know relatively less about history (including myself) feel like they already know the deal. There are a couple of exceptions- Ruaidri Ua Conchobair and Llewelyn Ap Gruffydd. Those two cards feel like a bit of a conscious nod to Irish and Welsh heritage to prevent the set from being too Windsor-centric, but it does add some variety and I have no objections. As a Top Trumps game, there are five categories of numbers to compete with. ‘Age’, ‘reign’ and ‘children’ are simple enough and hard to dispute. ‘Military might’ seems a little bit arbitrary and hard to justify- for example I’m at a loss why Camilla, Queen Consort has a military might ‘of ‘2’ where Edward VIII’s military might is given as ‘1’. Even more inexplicable is the “Top Trumps rating”, which essentially seems to be a random number with no real justification behind it at all. Queen Elizabeth II is undoubtedly the top trump, with a high score in every category except military might (which is utterly ridiculous given the Queen’s early life). When you’re playing the game, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria are other cards definitely worth hanging on to as well. I find the set a little sycophantic, and oddly compiled, both in terms of the selection of monarchs and the numbers they’re assigned. But for royal history lovers who enjoy a good game of Top Trumps, it does tick all the boxes.

Several of the facts are wrong. For example Elizabeth i did not reign for 5 years. Richard III was not a Lancastrian. Some of the cards are not kings or queens. It could have been so much better.

Daughter loves them

Please note the glaring error for the length of Elizabeth the firsts reign!

Not bad. Very new idea. Definitely not Retro Top Trumps though.

Next door little girl age 5 really enjoying playing this