Before SuperTrumf, all are equal

By Roger Irve Malm (2000-12-29). Translation by Peter Krefting.

In my younger youth, we played a lot of SuperTrumf. For someone who was, and still is, brutally uninterested in anything in a car other than how well they drive and how they look, it is still a mystery why I came to like the game as much. Unlike my old classmate Morgan, who was brought up with gasoline in his blood and oil in his hair, I had no natural feeling towards SuperTrumf, since it dealt with information that was pure Greek to me.

What is a cylinder anyway, and why is it that important with horse-powers? That horse powers influenced the velocity of the cars, that much I understood, but I could not avoid noticing that some cars actually had higher top speeds than others, even though they had a lower amount of horse-powers. And what were those mysterious kilowatts? That it had something to do with horse-powers, that I understood, but why would one need to values that said the same thing? And revolutions per minute, let's not get into those, that's something that I still today don't understand, and that I am not planning to try to learn. No, for me it was easier to grasp terms as top speed, length and weight.

Assuredly, I did have sort of an interest in cars, but it was a bit different. When other children played with cars, I collected models of veteran cars. And with these I did not play, they were beautiful to look at, and I had them stand in a row on my book shelf. If I wanted to play games, it should be about monsters and super heroes, cars were too trivial.

But SuperTrumf caught me, why I do not know. But I guess that, as the competitive soul I was, and still am, it was the element of having the best car that spoke to me.

I think that my first own SuperTrumf deck was Rally cars. My favorite card/car there was Lancia Stratos, card 1B. I think that the only reason for that was that it was the fastest of them all. Other cars were heavier, had more cylinders, etc., but Lancia Stratos was the fastest, and that was what counted. I believe that I once put my normal strategy of always choosing the velocity for that card aside. Instead, I chose number of horse-powers, and of course my opponent, who usually was my mother, had card 1A, a Triumph TR 7, which was a little bit better than Lancia Stratos. That hurt back then, and today one can remember the episode with nostalgia.

Before I stop I have to speak up a bit for card 6B in the Luxurious cars deck, a Sbarro Royal which, in addition to being 6 meters long and having 16 cylinders, also was, and still is, a really beautiful classic car.

Unfortunately, a deck called Fantastic cars over the ages appeared around the same time as my interest in SuperTrumf began to diminish. My younger brother came to have it, and today it is with envy I look through the cars, at least those up to number 4D, a beautiful Citroën Traction Avant 7CV built in 1937. After that card, a lot of cars built in the 1950s and later appear, and they obviously do not possess the same massive beauty of earlier made cars. I am seriously considering stealing the deck from my younger brother. I was kind enough to, long ago, give him my SuperTrumf decks, which I bitterly regret today, and you ought to get something back.

In retrospect, I think that the reason really was that, before SuperTrumf, all are equal. It was not about knowledge, it was about cunning and luck, and not about lying around under a car a whole day tinkering with the propeller shaft. Also, it most often was about beautiful, fun or special cars, and that is always tempting. But nowadays, I think that I mostly have that attitude towards women.

Roger Irve Malm today is [July 2008] 35 years old, married and living a relatively normal life, and does not show any permanent marks of his industrious SuperTrumf playing.