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:
