Take a careful look at a bottle of mineral water today and you’ll notice a table of figures amongst the small print, detailing the levels of the various minerals in the water. The ill-informed claim that these figures inform the purchaser of the health benefits of his selected brand, what piffle! The forgotten truth behind this is that the numbers were put there to allow travelling gentlemen to settle disputes without the need to respond to the sword or the pistol. Upon discovery of a secret tryst between a gentleman’s wife and a dastardly cur the gentleman would throw down his gauntlet and arrange to meet that most cowardly of cads at dawn to settle their dispute. At first light they would gather with official vigilators and select a velvet bag at random from a wooden chest, stand back to back, walk ten paces and turn around to face each other. At the signal from the invigilator both would draw the bottle of mineral water from the velvet bag, quickly scan the list of minerals and the aggrieved gentleman would get first opportunity to choose a mineral he considered to be high in a best-of-three competition, thus the game of Top Trumps was born.

Anyway, the business of meeting at dawn to select a velvet bag containing a bottle of mineral water is frightfully convoluted, wouldn’t it just be better if someone just printed out all the details on cards or something?? What’s that you say, nobody has ever thought of that??? Well, not until now! So, without further ado Dingle Speaks proudly presents Dingle Trumps – Shanghai Mineral Water Edition, get em while they’re still hot off the press!!

How to play Dingle Trumps*

1) Print out the cards onto fancy paper and carefully cut them out (get an adult to help).

2) Deal out the entire pack of cards to the players (no more than 15 players is recommended).

3) The starting player selects a category from the top card and reads out its value.

4) Each other player then reads out the value of the same category from their top card.

5) The player with the winning value wins all the cards in the current round and places them at the bottom of their pack.

6) Play continues with the new top-card until one player holds all the cards or a sufficient level of boredom is attained.

To download the cards, click on the image to open as full size (right click to open in a new window) and right click to save the image.

* Discovering a secret tryst between your betrothed and a sinister lover is optional