Kings and Queens by History Heroes

Kings and Queens by History Hereos contains individual, beautifully illustrated cards of forty key British kings and queens from Alfred the Great to Queen Elizabeth II.

Each card is illustrated to represent the individual monarch in history and shows their dates, her ‘house’ and seven gripping facts about them, including a joker fact about each character to surprise and/or entertain. Discover which monarch’s huge stomach exploded during his (oops, a bit of a clue there!) funeral, creating a terrible stench and who was described by one Victorian historian as ‘the most perfect character in history’.

The game also contains a card with the famous rhyme to help all players remember the order of all the kings and queens from 1066 to the present day.

Players 2 – 6. Age 8 years – adult. Dimensions: 85mm x 140mm x 20mm

HOW TO PLAY Kings and Queens by History Heroes

The aim of the game is to try and win the cards by guessing who the characters are from the facts read out from the cards. Players can play the games as a gentle voyage of discovery or a competitive game by choosing easy, hard or quirky facts from each card. Win the cards by guessing correctly who the character is from the facts read out on their cards. The winner is the person with the most cards at the end of the game, just the same as card games like Top Trumps.

Or, if you fancy, you can start by reading, enjoying and absorbing the facts in the History Heroes games – it doesn’t have to be a battle of wits from the get-go!

Getting Started

• You can share out all the cards and try to win them from each other by taking it in turns to read out the facts from any of your cards
• Or, you can have one master card reader, who reads out the facts for everyone else to guess and win. This works particularly well if you have a child who can read but may not know many facts to start with. The child loves being in control of the game, they absorb the information (without realising!) as they read out the facts and they LOVE seeing the adults squirm when they don’t know who the character is.

Top Tips

• If you have an equal, knowledgeable (and competitive!) group playing, try reading the facts from the bottom of the card upwards, from joker fact and hardest to easiest: the first person to guess correctly who the character is, wins the card
• If you’re all learning to begin with, make it easy and fun for all of you: use the images as clues; read the joker fact to entertain and then read the green facts for clues too
• If you have a mixed ability group, let those with knowledge guess from the hardest, red facts. Less knowledgeable players can guess from the image as a clue and the green facts
• Scoring Points: Give the different coloured facts different points: 1 for green; 2 for yellow; 3 for red; 5 for the Joker fact. Players can decide what level of fact they want to guess from to try to win points or cards
• When you’ve been playing the games for a while and think you know your facts, go completely random and introduce a dice: the facts are numbered from 1-6 so whatever number you throw is the fact you get from which to guess the character

More Ways to Play

Use History Heroes cards to play charades or a memory game – there are many, many ways to ‘skin the History Heroes’ cat! If you’ve ever played card games like Top Trumps, you will find History Heroes easy to start and play.