1967 Topps Football Cards in the 1969 Milton Bradley Win-A-Card Game
November 24th, 2009 | Published in Football Card Trivia | 3 Comments
I was putting some 1967 Topps cards up for sale the other day, and I noticed that one of them, the Tom Day card shown here, had a bit of brown along the top border. I remembered that 1967 Topps football cards had been included in a board game with 1968 Topps baseball cards, so I did a little web searching to refresh my memory. Here’s what I found:
According to an auction on the Heritage Auctions web site, the board game was called “Win-A-Card,” from Milton Bradley. The auction says that there were 132 cards in the game: 76 1968 Topps baseball cards, 33 1967 Topps football cards, 22 1965 Topps Hot Rod cards, and an instruction card. The 132 cards were printed on a single sheet created specially for the game. The bit of brown on the top of my Tom Day football card is part of a 1968 Topps baseball card. The baseball cards included a Nolan Ryan rookie card, Mickey Mantle, Brooks Robinson, Tom Seaver, Ed Mathews, Rod Carew, Gaylord Perry, Bob Gibson, and Hank Aaron.
BoardGameGeek.com has a picture of the box the game came in, a photo of some of the baseball and Hot Rod cards, and scans of the backs of the Mickey Mantle game card and regular-issue card. The back of the regular-issue Mantle card is orange, and the back of the game card is yellow, so it is easy to tell them apart. The difference between the football cards is subtler: the regular issue 1967 Topps cards have a yellow back, and the game cards have a lighter yellow back. I would not have noticed the difference on my Tom Day card if I hadn’t gotten part of a baseball card, too. In the scan below, the regular Tom Day card is on the left, and the game card is on the right.
BoardGameGeek also says that the game included a total of 50-70 cards. That’s probably not right, since if each game contained a partial sheet of cards, and if there was only one instruction card per sheet, not all games would have gotten an instruction card. I am inclined to believe Heritage’s assertion that the game included all 132 cards.
I also found an eBay listing for a 1967 Topps football card that lists the numbers of the football cards in the game. Oddly, the eBay listing is for a Gino Cappelletti card (card #3) that was not in the game. I don’t know where the eBay seller got the list of cards, so I can’t verify it. The Heritage auction, however, says that the game cards included Nick Buoniconti (#13), Buck Buchanan (#71), Joe Namath (#98), Fred Biletnikoff (#106), and Ron Mix (#125), and that jibes with the eBay listing.
According to the eBay listing, this is the full list of 1967 Topps football cards in the Milton Bradley Win-A-Card game:
| # | Player |
|---|---|
| 2 | Babe Parilli |
| 12 | Art Graham |
| 13 | Nick Buoniconti |
| 18 | Stew Barber |
| 22 | Dick Hudson |
| 28 | Billy Shaw |
| 30 | Nemiah Wilson |
| 31 | John McCormick |
| 32 | Rex Mirich |
| 48 | Ode Burrell |
| 49 | Larry Elkins |
| 51 | Sid Blanks |
| 58 | Ernie Ladd |
| 60 | Pete Beathard |
| 67 | Jerry Mays |
| 68 | Jim Tyrer |
| 71 | Buck Buchanan |
| 84 | Bill Neighbors |
| 86 | Tom Nomina |
| 87 | Rich Zecher |
| 88 | Dave Kocourek |
| 92 | Sam DeLuca |
| 95 | Winston Hill |
| 98 | Joe Namath |
| 103 | Daryle Lamonica |
December 21st, 2009 at 11:01 AM (#)
This is a great article about an old game that baseball and football card fanatics would love. I don’t think the baseball card set would include a Mantle as the article stated. It is not listed among the 76 baseball cards in the set as listed in the SGC price guide
December 21st, 2009 at 2:40 PM (#)
Hi Rick, thanks for your comments. Is the SGC price guide for the baseball cards online? I’d like to link to it.
The Boardgamegeek.com page I linked to said that the set includes a Mickey Mantle card, and so does this page: http://keymancollectibles.com/Gamestoys/winacard.htm. It’s certainly possible that they are wrong, though they do have pictures of Mantles with both yellow and orange backs.
June 13th, 2010 at 12:33 PM (#)
[...] I noticed that a handful of football cards from the 1969 Milton Bradley Win-A-Card game are currently listed on eBay. They look suspiciously like 1967 Topps cards, but you can see that each card has a strip of brown along the top or bottom edge. That strip of brown is a bit of a baseball card that was also printed for the Win-A-Card game. See my blog post from last November for a description of the game and the cards it included. [...]