If your looking for something to keep your small child and your husband busy during lock down I strongly suggest picking the one fandom your child is obsessed with and build a family board game around it! This chestnut idea came to me as a way to keep my kid off the video games and get him in the game and get the family working and being creative together. This was such a fun idea because my son already has all the makings for a Mario Party themed board game. However after making it now he wants us to play it, all the time!
Last year my husband wanted to get us a Nintendo 64 game system and since then my son has a little collection of games. He is obsessed with playing Mario Party lately. One he has been talking about for what seems like forever is Mario Party. My son has amassed a small collection of Mario action figures, plushies and wookbooks. Hes following in his parents foots steps..... toy collection blog idea!
Today however I am chatting about creating a board game with the fam! Like I suggest above having a wealth of the theme matter is helpful. Activity books with stickers, action figures and other characters, depending on what story or game you are trying to create or recreate will determine all game pieces. My son loves Mario Party and the game is set up like a board game already so I figure outside of trying to figure out how the actual board game will be played how difficult could this be?
Actually super easy and fun! I really enjoyed working on this project! I hope you enjoy the making of and are inspired to create your own family board game! Id love it if you shared your creations and maybe Ill do a roundup blog about them. So many blog ideas in this post!
Materials:
large pieces of cardboard or poster board.
glue
colored construction paper.
scissors
colored sharpies
stickers
action figures
coins/stars/game play cards
Print outs
Putting together the materials was easy. I had to play the video game several times before I could get the game premises written down, what the spaces mean and what color they should be and what each one does, what other characters we didn't have but could make, what other game elements we might need like cards. Then their is setting up the map.
I sketched out a map layout idea. I made sure to adjust the map to make enough room for the spots. I decided to make two game play boards one for Princesses Peaches castle and one for Bowsers. I started with Bowsers castle.
Bowsers Castle Board Game
My husband used his 3D printer to print out the characters we didn't have, princess peach, toad, bob-um and stars to use collect like in the video game. But you can make characters out of clay or recyclable materials.
Cutting out all the lands and arranging all the spaces was fun. It was easy to figure out the different color spaces and what they should do. Thanks to my son getting the Mario Activity books he had a tear out matching card game inside it that we decided to use as the game cards. Have to say it helped the game play. Same with the stickers. My son is still putting stickers on the game board and is changing the game play rules.
I'm pretty stoked on how this board came out. My kid was quick to play with it. I think I won! The Princess Peaches castle came out equally dope.
The two boards work together or apart. The game play is like the video game. You win coins, get enough coins and buy a star from Toad, land on a red spot and give all your coins to Bowser, tunnles take you any where on the boards where there is another tunnle. Its complicated but its actually really fun to play and knowing that my kid can be excited about a game he helped to make is the best reward of all!