Walt Disney famously said that “You can’t top pigs with pigs!” He was referring to the pressure he was under to make a sequel to The Three Little Pigs Short that was such a huge success for the Studio. While Walt was right, with any attempt to reuse the Pigs falling flat, I’m going to ignore his advice!

I’ve featured merchandise with the Pigs several times on this blog, and you can check out those earlier posts by typing ‘Three Little Pigs’ into the ‘Search’ box above.

But before you do, here I go again with another Pig sequel, Disney’s The Three Little Pigs card game:

Although this card game was produced by the Russell Manufacturing Company in Leicester, Massachusetts, it is presented in both English and French, while the official languages of the United States are English and Spanish. So, likely this game was intended for sale only in Canada.

The card backs have a nice assortment of Disney characters that have nothing to do with the game. It may help us to date the game, however. The newest characters on the card are from Lady and the Tramp (1955). Walt Disney Productions ended in 1987 as a branding copyright. There is an earlier version of this exact card game dating from 1946 but with different packaging. After some research and from my own knowledge, I’d say this was produced sometime in the 1960s.

And now, on to the rules:

There are four runs of 10 cards, each with an icon: A trowel (Practical Pig), a flute (Piper Pig), and a violin (Fiddler Pig). The fourth run has a piano which likely signifies the success the Pigs had in beating the Big Bad Wolf.

The game is simple. You follow the numbers on each set of cards from 1 to 10. You do this for all four sets. Whoever plays all of their cards first, wins. Then the remaining players add up their cards and the winner gets that number of points. I assume you would choose a number of rounds to play, or a total number of points needed to be the ultimate winner!

The images on the cards are the same for each run of 10 with each icon. But the four images seem to tell a sequential story. It starts with Practical Pig being angry with the other two for whatever reason. Then we see the two playful Pigs head out on the water in a wooden tub. Next, they start to sink, and lastly, Practical Pig has to save them. Again!

This would have been a very simple game for even very little children to play, like Crazy Eights or Old Maid.