Make Your Own Board Game

What can we use instead of thick cardboard, a ruler, or store-bought dice if we can't find them?

Use a flattened cereal box or shoebox lid instead of cardboard, a hardcover book or straightedge for the ruler, colored pencils or markers if you don't have special pens, a phone dice app or a jar lid with number stickers as a homemade die, and bottle caps or paper circles as player tokens.

The drawn board lines look crooked and game pieces slide off; how do we fix these problems before playtesting?

When transferring your sketch to the cardboard (steps 3–4), trace with a light pencil and a straightedge, let marker or paint dry completely before coloring, glue a small felt dot under tokens or draw recessed spaces to keep pieces from sliding, and run the quick test game (step 8) to check movement and balance.

How can we adapt this Make Your Own Board Game activity for younger children, older kids, and teens?

For younger children make a simple picture-based path with fewer spaces and big toy tokens and write very short rules on the rule sheet (step 5), for older kids increase spaces and add challenge cards or dice modifiers in the movement rules (step 6), and for teens add strategic elements like branching paths, resource tokens, and a more detailed decorated board (step 4).

What are easy ways to enhance or personalize our finished game before sharing on DIY.org?

Add custom event or power-up cards and record them on your rule sheet (step 5), make a cardboard spinner or glow-in-the-dark accents during decorating (step 4), laminate or protect the board after improvements (step 9), and include photos of your test play and the fix you made when you upload to DIY.org (step 11).