Feature Carveyance

Before the internet, before configurators and spec sheets you could summon at a tap, a deck of thirty-two cards let a child settle any argument about cars with cold, hard numbers. It was called Ace Trumps. Whoever had the higher figure won. Here's how a pocket-money card game made me.

How Ace Trumps Dealt Me a Lifelong Obsession with Cars

The pocket-sized game that turned 15-hour flights, sibling rivalry and a stack of statistics into the foundation of Carveyance.

Feature · 32 Cards, One Childhood · Origin Story

Of all the games I loved as a child, Ace Trumps was by far my favorite one that required absolutely no movement.

That was fortunate, because much of the time I played it, I was trapped inside an aluminum tube at 35,000 feet, somewhere between Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States.

My older brother introduced me to Ace Trumps while we were growing up overseas, and the game became our primary defense against the almost incomprehensible length of a transpacific flight. Fifteen hours is a long time today, even with Wi-Fi, noise-canceling headphones, hundreds of movies and enough downloadable entertainment to ignore your family until immigration.

Back then, fifteen hours was not a flight.

It was a sentence.

There were no seatback screens. There was one movie projected onto a pull-down screen several postal codes away from your seat. The color was usually wrong, the image was washed out and, depending on where you were sitting, the head of the leading actor might be obscured by an overhead compartment.

The headphones were even more advanced. They were made from a type of hard plastic that may now be illegal under several international treaties, with hollow rubber tubes connecting the earpieces to the armrest. Sound was apparently delivered by forcing air through the tubes, producing audio quality similar to someone swallowing a microphone during a windstorm.

The Walkman helped, but only until its batteries died—which they always did somewhere over the Pacific, usually during the best song on the cassette. The Game Boy had not yet arrived. Books were finite. Sleep was unreliable.

Our remaining entertainment options consisted of reading, playing cards and occasionally venturing into the smoking section at the back of the aircraft to see how long we could hold our breath before losing consciousness.

This is now best filed under Things the 1980s Somehow Allowed.

And then there was Ace Trumps.

Thirty-two cards. A few photographs. Several columns of numbers.

That was all we needed.

Before YouTube, online configurators, comparison websites and enormous searchable automotive databases, Ace Trumps allowed a child to hold an entire international motor show in one hand. A Porsche Turbo. A Ferrari 308. A Renault Alpine. A Triumph TR7. A Lancia Beta Montecarlo. An Opel Diplomat CD. A Mitsubishi Colt Celeste. A Simca you had never seen, from a country you had only recently learned to locate on a map.

Each card carried a photograph, the name of the vehicle and a compact stack of specifications: top speed, engine capacity, horsepower, acceleration, cylinders and weight. And then came the question that mattered.

"Top speed?"

My brother would read his number.

I would look down at my card.

Victory or devastation followed.

The game was generally branded Ace Trumps, Ace Trump Game or ACE Trump Game, rather than "Ace Trump Cards." Produced by the German firm Altenburg-Stralsunder and printed, as every well-worn case proudly stated, in West Germany, it became an important bridge between the older European game of Quartets and the statistical comparison games later dominated by Top Trumps. Today, Top Trumps is the name most people remember; it became so successful that the brand effectively swallowed the entire genre.

But Ace came first for me.

And Ace was the game that changed everything.

Ace Trumps did not simply appear fully formed in an airport gift shop. It evolved from the European tradition of Quartets, a card game normally played with 32 cards divided into eight groups of four. Traditional packs used labels such as A1, A2, A3 and A4, followed by the B, C and D groups, and players attempted to collect complete families of four, similar in principle to Go Fish or Happy Families. Cars, aircraft, ships, animals and machinery were natural subjects, because they could all be divided into clear families and classifications.

Ace kept much of that structure, including the familiar 32-card format, but made the information printed on the cards part of the battle itself. Instead of merely collecting families, you fought with figures. The person controlling the round chose a category — top speed, horsepower, engine capacity, acceleration, cylinders or weight — and every player announced their corresponding number. The winning card collected the round, and the victor earned the right to choose the next category. Tied cards stayed in the middle until a later round decided who claimed the accumulated pile.

Play continued until one person had captured the entire deck—or until dinner arrived, turbulence intervened or a parent demanded that we stop arguing over whether a lower weight should beat a higher one. Some editions added a Super Trump or special-action card capable of overturning the apparent order of things. The Super Trump beat everything except the top "A" cards; other special cards, in menacing yellow and red, forced every player to hand over their next card, or the top card of their entire pile. These introduced a dose of pure chaos into what otherwise resembled a civilized engineering conference. One moment you were carefully comparing power-to-weight ratios; the next, your brother played a special card and seized half your collection like a small, ruthless corporate raider.

Ace Trumps was an educational game clever enough never to admit that it was educational. Had an adult handed me a worksheet containing 32 cars and asked me to memorize their engine capacities, top speeds and national origins, I would have treated it as a violation of several basic human rights. Turn those same facts into ammunition against my older brother, however, and I would study them with the concentration of a Formula One engineer preparing for Monaco.

That was the whole trick.

A specification was no longer a fact.

It was a weapon.

"Porsche Turbo: 250 km/h" mattered because it could win a round. A particular acceleration time became memorable because it had rescued you from near-certain defeat. The obscure lightweight car stayed lodged in your mind because everyone underestimated it—until someone called weight and watched it flatten an exotic costing several times as much. The game made knowledge useful immediately, and because knowledge improved your odds, you wanted more of it.

At first glance, Ace Trumps appeared to depend almost entirely on luck. The cards were shuffled, and no one could control which vehicle appeared next. But luck only determined the machine you received. It did not determine how intelligently you used it.

A beginner looked at the biggest number and called it out. An experienced player examined the entire card and asked a far more important question: where does this particular car have an advantage? That is a surprisingly sophisticated concept for a children's game. The fastest car was not always the best card. The most powerful car might also be catastrophically heavy. A small sports car with modest horsepower could be devastating on acceleration or weight. A large luxury sedan might lose nearly every performance category but dominate engine displacement or cylinder count.

Ace Trumps taught me that the word best is meaningless unless it's followed by the words at what?

Best at top speed?

Best at acceleration?

Best at carrying less weight?

Best at producing power from a smaller engine?

Best at embarrassing a Ferrari despite looking as if it had been designed behind a regional appliance store?

Every vehicle possessed weaknesses. Every vehicle also possessed a category in which it could fight. That lesson stayed with me far beyond the card table.

Ace Trumps introduced me to the rarest and most desirable cars of its era, but its greatest gift may have been the cars nobody ever placed on a bedroom poster. The little guys. The forgotten coupes. The strange homologation specials. The French cars with unfamiliar names. The Japanese models that had never appeared in our neighborhood. The obscure Italian manufacturer whose card suddenly revealed an absurd top speed.

A child hunting for Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini could accidentally stumble onto Alpine, Matra, Simca, Bitter, De Tomaso, Lancia or some wonderfully odd Mitsubishi. The glamorous cars attracted your attention. The underdogs earned your affection.

Ace taught me that every car has flaws, but every car also has a strength. Something dismissed as slow might be exceptionally light. Something considered unfashionable might hide ingenious engineering. Something that looked utterly ordinary might possess one figure capable of defeating the most celebrated machine in the pack. It taught me to look beyond the cover—not only with cars, but with almost everything else in life.

There is strength where people see weakness, and value where people fail to look — and the underdog is often more fun precisely because it has the power to surprise you. That idea became central to the way I approach cars. The famous machines deserve attention, but the forgotten ones almost always have the better stories.

Ace Trumps taught me countries before I fully understood geopolitics. Italian meant Ferrari, Lancia, Lamborghini and Alfa Romeo. German meant Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Opel and Volkswagen. French meant Renault, Citroën, Alpine, Peugeot, Simca and the distinct possibility that the steering wheel might operate something no other manufacturer had considered necessary. British meant Jaguar, Lotus, Triumph, Aston Martin and a statistically significant chance of an electrical discussion later. Japanese manufacturers appeared right alongside the Europeans, introducing children to an industry that was rapidly expanding in influence and technical credibility.

The flags printed on the cards turned the deck into a pocket atlas. Cars were not simply objects; they belonged to nations, engineering cultures and design traditions. The game built numerical literacy, too: players grew comfortable comparing three- and four-digit figures, decimal acceleration times, cubic centimeters, kilograms and kilometers per hour. Technical vocabulary — displacement, turbocharging, cylinders, horsepower, weight — became familiar years before most children met it in a classroom.

I did not know I was learning.

I thought I was beating my brother.

The game knew better.

After hundreds of hours, the deck stopped feeling random. I knew the cars. I knew the photographs. I knew the categories. I knew which vehicle was almost unbeatable on speed, which one carried the enormous engine, which lightweight car could steal a round and which apparently impressive machine was secretly vulnerable. Eventually, I could recognize a card from its picture before reading its name. The deck became a mental map.

New players relied on whatever happened to be in front of them. Experienced players remembered what remained somewhere inside the opposing pile, and began estimating probabilities — learning to choose a category not merely because a number looked strong, but because you remembered how it stacked up against the rest of the deck. It was rudimentary statistical reasoning: weighing knowledge against luck, evaluating risk, calling the category that gave you the best chance. In retrospect, Ace Trumps was quietly teaching decision-making, pattern recognition and comparative analysis. At the time, it mainly taught me how furious I could become when my brother's unimpressive-looking car turned out to have two more cylinders than mine.

Ace Trumps was really three products concealed inside one inexpensive plastic case.

It was a game.

It was a collection.

And it was a miniature reference library.

You could play against someone, but you did not need another player to enjoy the cards. You could arrange them by country, manufacturer, top speed, engine size or personal preference. You could study the photographs, rank the cars, build imaginary garages or simply search the deck for something unfamiliar. It needed no board, dice, electricity or setup. It could be played in a bedroom, at school, in the back of a car, on a train, in an airport terminal or during a painfully long adult conversation about something no child had any intention of understanding.

And, critically for us, it worked perfectly on an airplane. It occupied almost no space. It required no batteries. It could survive turbulence, and it did not matter if the cabin lights dimmed. Unlike the Walkman, it never ran out of power. Unlike the movie, it did not depend on being seated behind someone with a reasonably sized head.

Cars may have been the gateway, but Ace Trumps covered almost anything that moved, flew, floated, raced or made an impressive amount of noise. The company produced packs of Formula One cars, racing cars, supercars, rally cars, classic cars, Japanese cars, German cars, British and French cars, motorcycles, record breakers, off-road vehicles and individual marques such as Porsche, Ferrari and Rolls-Royce. Beyond automobiles came aircraft, helicopters, locomotives, tanks, warships, sailing ships, speedboats, fire engines, heavy transport and other machines that looked capable of waking an entire neighborhood.

The range reflected the technological optimism of the period. Concorde represented the future. Formula One represented danger and glamour. Turbocharging promised astonishing performance. Japanese manufacturers were challenging the established European powers. Supercars were becoming cultural objects, entering children's bedrooms through posters and magazines even when they remained almost impossible to see in person. Ace converted that distant world into something a child could hold and control.

The promotions only deepened the fantasy. In 1976, Ace ran a competition whose grand prize was a flight on Concorde, alongside an offer to send away for a huge colour Concorde poster in exchange for credit-card points clipped from the packs. Later came a whole series of posters to collect — Concorde, great Formula One cars, drivers and races, famous tanks, warships and steam locomotives — and children were invited to design their own futuristic Formula One cars. Ace was selling more than cards. It was selling entry into the mechanical future.

Once I had memorized the decks, the information printed on them was no longer enough. I wanted to know why. Why was one car faster? Why did another have more cylinders but less horsepower? Why was the lighter car so effective? What made the obscure one special? Who designed it? How many were built? Why had I never seen one?

That curiosity sent me into libraries. I began hunting for books and magazines containing the vehicles from the game, and the trail never ended: one paragraph led to another model, one manufacturer led to another country, one technical specification opened the door to engineering, racing history, design, economics and personalities. I could not get enough. I wanted to know about the fastest cars, the largest cars, the rarest cars, the most unsuccessful cars and the machines history had almost forgotten. Especially the machines history had almost forgotten.

Ace Trumps did not merely give me facts. It gave me the thirst for facts. And that distinction matters, because you can teach someone a collection of information, but it is far more powerful to make them want to search for the next piece themselves.

No manufacturer ever engineered a car to win an Ace round — its direct effect on the market is impossible to prove, and probably nonexistent. Its indirect effect is the interesting one. Ace taught a whole generation to see automobiles through horsepower, top speed, acceleration, displacement, cylinders and weight — to grant a car authority on paper without ever seeing or driving it. It helped create what you might call the paper supercar: the machine whose greatness arrived entirely as numbers. The Lamborghini Countach was the purest example of the species — a car almost nobody in my orbit had ever seen in the metal, yet every one of us knew cold, because its figures had lived on a card in our hands. We worshipped a shape and a top speed long before we understood there was a real car attached.

The format rewarded what could be measured. Steering feel, ride quality, reliability, visibility, repair costs and emotional character were far harder to squeeze into a tiny specification box. Ace taught comparison brilliantly — but it also taught a very particular type of comparison, quietly reinforcing the enthusiast reflex that more power, more cylinders and a higher top speed automatically make the better car. And then, in the same breath, it complicated that reflex — by proving over and over that a supposedly lesser machine could win the moment you called a different category.

More importantly, Ace preserved obscure machines inside childhood memory. A forgotten car placed beside a Ferrari became part of the same universe. Thousands of children may have learned its name even if they never once met it on the road. Ace cannot be credited with creating today's collector markets, but it helped keep certain cars culturally alive—and a model remembered from childhood has a far better chance of being searched for, discussed, restored and desired decades later.

The game planted seeds.

Some of those children eventually became designers, engineers, journalists, collectors, mechanics, historians and buyers. And at least one of them eventually created Carveyance.

The strange part of the Ace story is that it never became a major mainstream American product. It was not banned. There was no known legal obstacle preventing its sale. Individual decks undoubtedly reached the United States through travelers, importers, military families and children like us moving between different parts of the world. What Ace apparently lacked was a sustained national American release — and several factors probably explain why.

The cards were unapologetically European — kilometers per hour, kilograms, cubic centimeters and 0–100 km/h acceleration rather than miles per hour, pounds, cubic inches and 0–60 times. That did not make the game impossible to understand; in fact, it may have taught me the metric system better than several years of schooling. But a serious American launch would have required real localization: new measurements, a different selection of vehicles, revised packaging and a marketing campaign explaining the whole concept. Ace also lacked the enormous American retail and distribution machine needed to place a cheap card game in department stores, toy stores, drugstores and supermarkets nationwide. A low-priced product survives on volume, and without a powerful distributor, even a brilliant game can vanish unnoticed.

And America already had Hot Wheels. Hot Wheels gave children physical cars they could hold, race, crash, modify and launch down orange plastic tracks into furniture, pets and younger siblings. Ace offered photographs and statistics; Hot Wheels offered kinetic destruction. That was formidable competition. Later attempts were made to bring similar comparison-card games across the Atlantic — some Top Trumps material was reportedly retitled for the American market, a hint that publishers doubted the original European branding could simply be carried over unchanged. The concept eventually reached the United States more successfully, but Ace itself missed the necessary combination of localization, distribution and timing during its original lifespan.

Growing up in Singapore and Hong Kong placed my brother and me in precisely the sort of international environment where Ace made perfect sense.

The cards were metric.

The cars were global.

So were we.

Ace helped develop the language of the statistical comparison game. Top Trumps won the brand war. Ace experimented with a bewildering array of names and sub-series — Trump Game, Supertrump, Power Trumps, Top Ace, Maxi Mini Trumps, Fact Packs and more. The variety was imaginative, but it may also have diluted the central identity. Top Trumps offered a far simpler proposition: whatever the subject — cars, aircraft, animals, sports or entertainment — it was Top Trumps. The company expanded more aggressively, secured stronger retail distribution and eventually landed major entertainment, television and character licenses. The name grew so dominant that many people now use "Top Trumps" to describe any game based on comparative statistics.

Ace helped create the grammar. Top Trumps published the dictionary and put its name on the cover.

Original Ace Trumps decks remain collectible today. Completeness matters: collectors look for all 32 cards, the original case, instruction cards, matching backs, promotional inserts and cards unmarked by pens, food, aircraft meals or accusations of cheating. Sealed packs and unusual promotional editions tend to attract the most attention—but the most emotionally authentic deck may be the one with softened corners and a cracked plastic hinge.

A perfect deck tells you it was preserved.

A battered deck tells you it was loved.

For an adult collector, buying an old Ace pack is not simply acquiring a few pieces of printed cardboard. It is recovering the first version of the automotive world that ever existed in his or her imagination.

Ace Trumps was my favorite game that did not involve moving. Yet, in a sense, it moved me farther than any game with a board, a spinner or tiny plastic pieces ever could.

It carried me from those long flights into libraries.

From numbers into engineering.

From famous cars into forgotten ones.

From memorizing statistics into asking questions.

From asking questions into researching stories.

And eventually from researching stories into writing them.

The fascination bled into the rest of my life, too. The habit of collecting information, remembering unlikely facts and hunting for the hidden strength in an overlooked subject has served me well professionally and creatively — and made me disproportionately dangerous at bar trivia, which may be the game's most measurable long-term return on investment.

But its deepest effect was automotive. Ace Trumps did not simply teach me which car was fastest; it taught me to ask why it was fast. It was one of the most elegant pieces of disguised education ever sold as a pocket-money game — mathematics, vocabulary, geography, probability and comparative reasoning smuggled in without a single second of it feeling like school. Its effect on the automotive market cannot be measured in sales charts or auction prices. Its effect on automotive imagination can.

Carveyance is, in many ways, the grown-up version of turning over the top card.

What is this machine?

Where did it come from?

What does it do better than everything else?

Where does it fail?

And what hidden strength has everyone overlooked?

It was supposedly a game about numbers. For me, it became a way of thinking. And somewhere over the Pacific — between the distorted movie screen, the dying Walkman batteries and those deeply questionable pneumatic headphones — it dealt me the first hand in a lifelong love affair with cars.

Shuffle the deck. Somewhere in it is a car nobody remembers, waiting for you to call its best category.