Make your own Monopoly Board game based on YOUR town

I wasn’t planning on writing this post, but then my daughter had other ideas…

In fact, she has a lot of ideas, and perhaps one day she might have her own blog, likely it’ll be very different to mine, as it’ll be a hell of a lot more creative and crafty than I could ever have managed….you see my daughter is awesome.

This weekend, we made our own monopoly board, based on our local Saffron Walden town. We then created some money, Chance cards, grabbed some dice and had a game together!

It was a simple craft activity that kept her occupied all day, and the litte grey cells worked overtime thinking up thirty different ideas for the chance cards, the spaces and colours for the sets on the board, and the way that she would play the game without having to make single cards for all the property she decided on.

I thought it was so wonderful that I would share it with you….

You need:

• A3 photo paper
• White card
• Coloured card
• Felt-tip pens
• Ruler
• Buttons, as playing pieces; though the kids did deide that their Moshi Monsters would make rather good playing pieces after a few rounds
• Notebook; we decided NOT to make the property cards, but instead the names of the properties in here when you landed on them and paid for them. However, you might want to take the time to make some. All you would need is some more white card, and the same colour felt-tips that you would use for the board to colour in your property strips
• A basic knowledge of your village, town, or anywhere actually – whatever location you pick you can go with the flow
• Lots of imagination.

Once you have gathered all these materials, all you really need to do then is to let your kids’ ideas carry you wheverer they want you to go!

How to make your local-based monopoly board

• Create a prototype for your board on a rough piece of A3 photo paper; this way you can plan out which locations you are going to have on the board, where your chance spaces will go, and how many sets you are going to create. Once you are happy, create the real thing!
• Some suggestions for what you might put on your local monopoly set are:
  • The street where you live
  • Your school
  • Local shops
  • Restaurants
  • Attractions
  • Places you visit regularly, my daughter was keen to get our local common on there, as well as her favourite playground, and the home ground for my son’s football team. The options are endless though…and it is great fun to decide with them too
• Make your money by drawing out your notes; your demoninations with depend on what you decide your rent and property costs are going to be. Make sure you have enough, and of the right sizes. My daughter was keen to pick lots of different kinds so we all had lots of money ;-)

• If you can, you can photocopy your sheets to make it easier to make them. I could give you a printable here, but I think that half the fun is creating one yourself :-D
• Make your chance cards with whatever colour card you would like. We decided to have 30, with 10 *bad* ones and 20 *good* ones. You can decide what they say, but some of the ones we had were:
  • Go to xxxx school, and pay fees of £150….not sure where we got this one from
  • Go back to Tesco as you overpaid, collect £10
  • You win a football match, roll again, and so on.
• Grab your dice, and you are ready to go!

Aim of the game

This is a little less sophisticated than the proper game of Monopoly which we have in our lounge, as we didn’t make any houses and hotels. The aim of the game is to continue until all the properties have been bought, and then you can see who has the most money. Alternatively, you could put a time limit on play. However, a lot of the fun is in the making, so I wouldn’t get too hung up on the rules!

We hope you like our homemade Monopoly; if this has given you a hankering for the real monopoly, there are some great new versions of the game out there at the moment, from the Monopoly Despicable Me 2 Board Game, to a Liverpool Monopoly set…think I might add that one to the Daughter’s list for next Christmas!

If you really did want to build some hotels and houses, I am sure you could do so, or perhaps just find some small stones to use instead. Perhaps you could use bigger ones for the hotels, and much smaller ones for houses….

If you want to make your own board game, but not Monopoly, do take a look at this article for inspiration. You might just like that too!

Happy crafting :-D

Helen

Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine!Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time.KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10.It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania.Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on.Get in touch TODAY!

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