Craft Project: Board Game

In a couple of weeks, it's my friend Laura's birthday, so I've been brainstorming ideas of what to get her for her present.  While I was thinking about past presents, I remembered that I made Laura a personalised board game last Christmas, so I thought I'd share how I did it on here in case anyone wants to make one for their friends!

Laura's all-time favourite movie is The Lion King, so I decided use that as a theme so Laura could own a game based on one of her specialist subjects!  One great thing about making your own board game is that you can add as many in-jokes and references to things only your friends will understand, so I tried to incorporate an element of that into the game as well.

To make the game, I used an old board game that we never play any more as a base and decorated the board and the box.  If you don't own a game that you're willing to recycle, you could pick one up from a charity shop.  I glued coloured card on to the box and then added pictures I'd cut out from an old Lion King book - I especially love the side of the box with Scar waving to Mufasa's ghost!

I decided to make a Trivial Pursuit style game with question cards - I had four different colours of card, and I cut out 40 question cards in each colour.  I also cut out white cards to glue to the back of each coloured card so that they were thicker and more professional looking, but I would advise skipping this step if you're not a crazy perfectionist with a lot of time on your hands like I am...

I coloured the squares on the board to correspond to the question cards, so if players land on a pink square they have to take a pink card, and so on.  I decided that pink cards would be character-based questions, yellow were song-related questions, blue were trivia and green were Pictionary-style drawing questions where players have to draw a character or object and everyone else guesses what it is.  It was pretty hard to come up with enough Lion King questions, I'm slightly embarassed to admit that I ended up watching the movie and taking notes!

While coming up with 160 Lion King questions was somewhat of a challenge even for a Disney fan like me, making the board was definitely a more enjoyable activity!  The board that I used as a base folded in four places, so I glued paper over each section, leaving a narrow space along each fold so the board could still easily be folded away.  The most fun part was making up rules to write on the board and deciding which scenes to draw alongside them - I tried to pick all of Laura's favourite moments!  Here's a few detail shots:

 I think my favourite rule was 'Move back 10 spaces if you've never cried at Mufasa's death,' we have some heartless friends! ;) 

To finish off the game, I decoarted a blank notebook with another picture cut out from the book so that everyone would have something to use for the drawing questions.  

I also made a little rule sheet - making 'shortest person starts' a rule will probably always work out in Laura's favour!

While it was a time-consuming project, I really enjoyed making the game and Laura (hopefully) really enjoyed playing it!  I'm looking forward to making some more, maybe for the children in my family next time.

Faye

xxx