Holiday Haul Highlights

The holiday season may be over, but I got somewhere between 12" and 15" of snow dumped on me since yesterday. Most of the inside decorations are still up so there's a lingering of winter holiday still in the air. And since I'm home-bound for the day, I have time to finally share some of the wonderful pop culture goodies I received.

I'll start with the Doctor, since he's had a lot of attention lately. The Weeping Angel is from Titan Merchandise. They have a couple waves of blind boxed Who mini-figures but the Angel is from the 6" line. I have a feeling my wife will end up regretting getting this for me, she does not like the Angels. To the right is the latest pack of Doctor Who Top Trumps, the popular UK card game, featuring characters from Seasons 6 and 7. Along the bottom is another UK card game, Attax, put out by Topps Direct. I also got a this wall calendar which was too large to fit into the photo and a pair of TARDIS sleep pants.

Top Trumps Halloween

As excited as I was about the Horror set, I was even more thrilled to hear there would be a Halloween Top Trumps pack released. The excitement level dropped a bit after seeing the first promo images for the set. The images showed creatures that were in the Horror set and I wasn't sure if they were just reprinting the Horror set with a new look. I was a little hesitant to buy them sight unseen.

As turns out, it's not the same set! There are 10 cards unique to the Horror pack and there are 11 cards unique to the Halloween pack, which works out to about a 1/3 difference in each. Although the artwork for the shared cards is reused here, the vintage monster movie poster style is a great way to present them.

Just like the Horror pack, there's some generic monsters but there's no question who some of them (The Alien) are supposed to be. I absolutely love the fact that there is a Mad Magician card (bottom right), which is one of Vincent Price's lesser known horror roles and one of my Top 10 Price films.

I like the cards as sort of a movie monster pack but I wouldn't market it as Halloween. Maybe a Halloween one would have different types of candy or costumes. Anything to make it feel more like Halloween instead of a monster movie roll call. I want to make a Halloween card or board game that is not only fun but captures the fun of Trick or Treating. If only I had a clue how to design games!

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Top Trumps Horror

Top Trumps is a popular card game that originated in the UK. Each "pack" of 30 cards is centered around a theme like cars, dinosaurs or pop culture properties. It's played very similar to War. The main difference is that the cards have several categories in which they're ranked. The person whose turn it is selects their best category and the opponent(s) compare that stat on their card and the highest card wins the round and the cards.

I have quite a few packs of Top Trumps cards in the areas of my pop culture interest like Doctor Who and Star Wars. So I was very happy to see them come out with a Horror themed pack a couple years ago featuring all sorts of creeps and spooks.

What makes this particular pack even cooler is that they glow in the dark!
If they're too scary to play with in the dark, they also work well under blacklight.

Check out the Wiki entry to learn more about Top Trumps.
And you can go here to see scans of the vintage '70s/'80s Horror packs.

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