Making a simple board game is one of the easiest and fun things you can do on a rainy afternoon.
You will need:
4 pieces of different coloured A4 (or Letter) sized paper
A large game board sized piece of heavy card
Felt tip pens
First, cut a strip off the length of each piece of paper about five centimeters (one inch) wide. Cut each of these strips into small squares.
They don’t have to be particularly uniform, in fact it’s better if there are a few smaller pieces as well as a bunch of bigger squares.
Draw a line around the piece of cardboard which will be the track of your game play. Stick a start and finish square at each end:
Then glue all of the little squares side by side along the line…
…until the entire line is covered. It’s best if you mix up the colours so that not too many of the same colour are sitting next to one another – but it doesn’t really matter if they do.
Make a couple of “short cut” places to give the game a bit of interest:
Decorate elaborately or minimally or not at all. You could number the squares if this takes your child’s fancy.
Take the remaining coloured paper and cut each sheet into uniformly sized rectangles:
On the backs of these write your game playing instructions such as “Miss a turn”, “Move forward three spaces”. Obviously it’s more fun to elaborate a little so that they say things like “Win Australian Idol! Move forward two spaces” or “Slip on a banana peel, go back one space” etc. AJ and I came up with the card ideas together – so they were all familiar concepts to a preschooler – “Mummy has a nap, miss a turn”, “Pancakes for dinner! Move ahead three spaces,” but of course they also got faintly ridiculous such as “Meet a monkey who eats your teeth! Go back five spaces”. Because a card will be picked up on every square, I also included a lot of “Stay where you are” cards just so that the game play doesn’t go too quickly.
Our game was vaguely family themed, with pictures of relatives hastily drawn on the squares and on the board. You could come up with all kinds of different themes and looks. I remember when I was a kid we did a similar thing but we made it look like a haunted house and all the instructions were spoooooky. Take you child’s topic du jour (pirates, Wiggles, Thomas, bugs, etc) and make the game board and card instructions fit in.
Make a couple of counters out of rolled up scraps of paper and you are ready to play! Our rules (and they seemed to change with every minute) were simple. The youngest player starts. She (or he, but it was she for us) rolls the dice and moves the number of spaces shown. She picks up a card of the corresponding colour to the place she has landed on and follows the instructions. If she is told to move ahead or back she does so, and her turn ends without picking up another card. Move to the next player.
The older the child the more complicated you might like to make the rules. If you land on a square occupied by another counter, you have to do 20 star jumps or maybe if you land on a square marked with a star get a special star card which you can use to avoid squares marked with aliens (and alien marked squares might mean you have to change counters with another player or something) — really, there is no limit to how wild it could get.