EXCLUSIVE: Top Trumps launches new Torah edition
The classic card game will now include a set featuring characters from Chumash. Jewish News talked to the young British Jewish entrepreneur behind the idea
Jacob competing with Esau while Moses squares up against Pharaoh; these Biblical match-ups could soon be finding their way to your game collection, thanks to JoJo Sugarman, who has teamed up with Top Trumps to create a special Torah version of the classic card game.
The 30 cards feature some of the most famous men and women in the Chumash, from Adam and Eve through to Caleb and Joshua. And, as Pharoah’s presence suggests, there are bad guys mixed in with the good.
Sugarman confirms, as one might expect, that “we started talking about it at the Shabbat table. I’ve got a 10-year old brother in law who said ‘why aren’t there Torah Top Trumps?’”
Having had the idea, they started talking about how one might go about it, and what categories would work, because, as he described, “you can’t really say Avraham’s braver than Moshe…the Jewish community would not buy that, and also there’s no educational value to that, it would be total nonsense.”
In the end, the categories they decided on were: Years lived, children, Divine dealings (eg. Number of direct visitations from God or angels, as described in the Torah], first Parsha mentioned (one being the lowest) and the number of Parshiyot present.
Jojo knew that the company which produces Top Trumps, Winning Moves, do special niche card sets.
“I called them up a couple of times and I eventually got a meeting with them. I explained that there’s a lot of value on education in the Jewish community, and we could really make them [the cards] really cool, and they’ve been super supportive and excited about the whole thing.”
In the 10 months since that meeting, the Biblical personages have been chosen, the facts have been double and triple checked – with Rabbinical advice taken – and the cards designed. Sugarman’s wife’s grandmother, “a Judaica artist for almost 40 years”, has presented silhouettes of the figures in question in a famous Torah scene in which they feature, maximising their educational value. Rebecca, for example, is pictured watering the camels, while Lot is showing fleeing Sodom with his daughters while his wife turns into a pillar of salt. All the sources for the figures on the cards will be provided on a new website, Rimon Games.
“Sometimes we had to use a Midrashic [Commentaries] source, because maybe the age wasn’t revealed”, Sugarman explains.
“The lengthy family trees that we sometimes get in the Torah came in handy.”
This project is currently an ex-curricular interest, though Sugarman – a 24 year old Immanuel College and Oxford University graduate, is very much involved in the field of education. He is the founder of gcsewriting.com – which allows students to write regular English GCSE essays and receive direct feedback from examiners themselves.
“Not to be too political, but there is a bit of a crisis in kids not having Torah education”, he says.
“The amount you learn from playing is actually quite astonishing, because you learn, first of all, who the characters are, secondly, a key moment in the form of an image, there’s also a key fact from their life, and then you’ve got where in the Torah they’re appearing, how many kids… there’s a huge potential to use these in quizzes.”
The cards, which will be launched on Friday 5 December, will initially be available at select stores in London (Kosher Kingdom in Golders Green, Aisenthal Judaica in Temple Fortune, and B Kosher in Hendon, Edgware and Borehamwood), but Sugarman hopes to soon make them available directly to other communities around the country.
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