How to Make a Card Game

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A great way to have fun educating your children in homeschooling is to make a card game. There are several games you can make, and they are easy to create. Check out which games you can make, and how to make them.

Our favourite game to make is TopTrumps.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it – the rules are explained in Wikipedia.

Even before they could read the cards my children would say things like “the one at the bottom – a 2 and a 0”

They liked that they could play a ‘proper’ game they had made themselves, and I liked that they were using numbers a lot and deciding which number was the greater (sneaky homeschooling!).

How to Make a Top Trumps Game

make a card game

  • First, you need to pick a topic. Some games we have made include Wild Animals, Cars, Machines (trucks, bulldozers, aeroplanes and the Hubble telescope were included), Insects and Dog breeds (although Top Trumps have their own version of this now!).

  • The fun part of making a card game is choosing the pictures – you can search for images on google or from abc-kid. We usually just print them on paper, then cut them out and glue them onto old playing cards.

  • Next, collect together the statistics needed. You could start with just three easy statistics per card – something that you could easily make up. Size, Speed, and Danger were initial favourites for us and we just marked them out of 10 (with, for example, a snail being the slowest so getting a 1, and cheetah being the fastest and getting 10).

    This can create a card game with an unbalanced set of cards, with some cards ALWAYS winning and others ALWAYS losing – but the children were so pleased at being able to play a game that they had made, that they never seemed to mind.

    Lately our decks have used 5 categories and we have done more internet research to find correct statistics (Age, weight and length for example, are usually easy to find).

    More ways to make your own homeschooling card games :

    If you think it is fun to make your own card games, then there are several others you could try.

    1. Snap is easy and fun for smaller children – just make two or more cards the same.

    2. Happy families – make 'families' of cards for each pack. How about the stages of animal development or landmarks within countries.

    3. Pelmanism – this is the memory game where players turn over two cards and try to match them. A good educational variation on this game is to match two connected cards – capitals and country, French and English words, two paintings by the same painter – or make a card game about whatever your homeschooling project is!!

    4. Make Your Own Board Game – If you have had fun designing your own card game, why not try creating a board game from scratch. Find out how to get started.

    Happy Shuffling!! And good homeschooling.

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