The comic book heroes – and villains – of the Mighty World of Marvel make their fascinating and occasionally baffling card game debut.
It says a lot that the Marvel Comics Super Heroes trump card game of 1977 makes no mention of the publishing company anywhere on the front of the packaging, other than in a very small print copyright notice at the bottom. It is unthinkable that any licenced product from Marvel today would not have the company name and approved logo splashed all over it, but in this card game, it seems almost insignificant. It’s not that Marvel wasn’t a big name in the comic book superhero world back then – clearly, the company was one of the two leading publishers of such fare – arguably the biggest, even if DC’s Superman and Batman were the best-known costumed crime fighters with the general public. In Britain, Marvel was certainly the market leader thanks to the UK weekly comics that had been published since the early 1970s – DC had no British equivalent. Of course, Marvel was fairly low down the pecking order of UK comics as a whole, the DC Thompson and IPC weeklies that spoke to very British tastes generally outselling them.
Top Trumps and the various copycat card games were a big thing in the mid-1970s, offering a mind-bogglingly varied collection of games that covered subjects from cars and planes to military vehicles, animals and more, with each card having three categories that players would challenge each other on – the highest scoring cared won the round. It was (and is) a game of chance, but there was a sense of skill involved too – as with any card game, you could try to read your opponent to guess if they held a particularly strong card, in which case it was sometimes better to gamble on challenging with a lower-scoring category that their otherwise unbeatable card might be weaker on. But of course, it was ultimately all guesswork.
The games had begun as rather grounded in their tastes, aimed at the trainspotting mentality of small boys, but by 1977 they had begun to venture into wilder territories with the likes of Doctor Who and the legendary Horror editions. While the games that focused on cars, tanks and such fed into that anal obsession with facts and figures that small boys like and so would feature very specific, proven facts about top speed, firepower, size and so on, once the games entered the more nebulous world of the fantastic and fictional, things became a lot vaguer. At some point, someone had to sit down and decide if Godzilla had more killing power’ or ‘fear factor’ than King Kong. The results were not always satisfactory.
In the case of the Marvel game, players could choose to either play heroes against villains – with the victor in each round keeping their opponent’s cards to one side until they have won them all – or in a mixed-up free-for-all. The former version required some familiarity with which characters were which in the Marvel universe, which is made harder by the inclusion of a few characters that didn’t exactly become mainstays of the comics – I’m assuming that The Grizzly was a villain but have no idea who he battled – and some morally ambiguous characters like the Sub Mariner.
The top score for everything seems to be 9 – until you come to the Silver Surfer, who scores a whopping 10 on ‘Special Powers’. Given that 10 out of 10 is an option, you have to wonder why Galactus only scores 9 for ‘Physical Strength’ – I mean, doesn’t he eat entire planets? Just how much stronger could anyone be? Other characters to hit the highest level for strength are The Thing, The Hulk, Thor and, of course, The Silver Surfer. At the other end of the scale, you didn’t want to be landed with either of the female superheroes here, The Wasp and The Invisible Girl, both of whom have a measly score of 1 for Physical Strength, lower even than the geriatric Vulture and matched only by The Gremlin. You could blame this on the sexism of the card producers but honestly, it’s more down to Marvel’s rather dismal track record with female characters at this time; had the game come out a year or two later, maybe Ms Marvel could’ve evened things out a bit.
Players expecting cover star Spider-Man to have boosted scores will be surprised – he gets 7/6/6 for Physical Strength/Special Powers/Weapons, which feels a tad stingy, to be honest. The aforementioned Vulture beats him on Special Powers, as does Ghost Rider and I demand a recount. Eyebrows might be raised at other scores too: The Thing and The Hulk get 5 each for Weapons, and I’d like to know just what these weapons are exactly. There is a ‘none’ score for Weapons, incidentally – both the ladies are stuck with this, making their cards especially unwanted (and didn’t The Wasp have stingers that she could fire?).
There are a few odd character choices here – as well as The Grizzly and The Gremlin, other also-rans include The Jackal, The Human Top, Tiger Shark, Hammerhead and Absorbing Man. Are these really the best that was available to make up 20 villains? I could name several villains off the top of my head who were bigger deals at the time and are not here (the Scorpion, Ultron, the Mole Man). The inclusion of Captain Britain is pleasing, even if it is a sop to the British players. I’m not sure if Top Trumps was ever a thing in the US, making this a rare UK-only bit of Marvel merchandising.
As Marvel has become absorbed into Disney and become a cultural juggernaut, the likelihood of anything as random as this appearing again. This isn’t even an official Top Trumps game, making it all the more strange. Licenced comic book merchandise used to be gloriously chaotic, but those days are over. Top Trumps are still around – a physical card game that has somehow survived the electronic blitz, even though digital versions now exist alongside it. There are even Marvel Superheroes and Villains games out there. But this game, a snapshot of a time (the 1970s) and place (the UK) will never be repeated. Kids today would find it all sorts of baffling.
DAVID FLINT
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I own this along with one of the two horror ones. The art was superb on the Marvel one.
I recognize the images on many of the cards in the photos provided. They appear to all be clipped directly from Marvel comic covers from the time.
I presume Top Trumps is an exclusively British card game, as I’ve never encountered it before reading this article. It sounds quite similar to a children’s game played in the U.S. called “War” that is played with a standard poker deck.
Typical for us bloodthirsty Americans to name a children’s card game “War” eh?