This ‘Doctor Who’ specials edition of Top Trumps features 30 different characters from the 2011 series of Doctor Who, which ran on the BBC from April to October 2011. Players compete in the categories Height, Intelligence, Monster Rating, Darkness, and Courage.

As well as the expected characters of the Doctor, his assistants Amy and Rory, and the TARDIS, this pack also contains characters from single episodes of the series, such as Vincent Van Gogh and the Vampire Girls.

The game:
Top Trumps is a competitive card game which first became a craze in school playgrounds in the mid 1970s. The game developed from ‘quartets’, which had a similar objective: to beat your opponents and win all the 40 or so cards.

Sold for pocket money prices, in the early days Top Trumps was marketed mainly to boys, and the military-focused subjects included cars, planes and trucks. In 1982, Waddingtons took over the brand and determined to broaden the game’s appeal, introducing decks featuring cats and dogs as well as horror characters, football teams and prehistoric monsters.

In 1999 Winning Moves relaunched the brand, producing smaller decks of only 30 cards and tying the games in to popular culture. They now produce packs for every major event, TV series and film release.

Rules of the game:
At the start of the game, all the cards are dealt out equally between players. Each card contains statistics such as speed, weight, length etc. The starting player calls out the category that he/she feels will ‘trump’ the other players, and then lays the card face up. The remaining players show their cards and the one with the highest score wins, and takes all the cards. The player that holds all of the cards is the winner.