Last summer I made a lot of different Life Size Games and I wanted to go into detail about how each of them were made and give you some resources that may help you to create your own Life Size Games 🙂 I will also give you some dos and don’ts that I ran into along the way !! The LSGS that I made were: Monopoly, Scrabble, Jenga, Yahtzee, and Checkers.
Monopoly
Monopoly looks like it is the hardest to create but it was really nice because there are many resources that I found online to help with the pieces. Here are all the resources that I found to create Life Size Monopoly.
Life_Sized_Monopolygetting_started
You will need a printer that can print out bigger pieces for you game board pieces. My game board pieces were printed on legal size sheets. I then used poster board strips to increase the size of the game board piece. I did all of the printing, and attaching of the poster board strips before lamination. These end up being pretty big pieces so you will need a very big laminator. I reached out to our local school who I knew had a large laminator and they did it for very inexpensive for me. I would reach out to your local schools before going to box stores due to price.
I had a lot of parents who donated old monopoly money, chance, and community chest pieces to me. So we used regular sizes for these. You could get creative and make LARGE SIZE of all of these as well if you wanted. The title cards file is nice because you can change it up of what you want it to say and such 🙂 They have it as Libraries and Publishing Houses as their houses and hotels for example.
For the ‘libraries’ and ‘publishing houses’ we used large milk cartons and smaller milk cartons and spray painted them with their tops remaining on. These worked out really well but storage can be an issue due to size. Also make sure you clean them out really well so that they don’t smell over time.
Right on Amazon I bought the huge blow up dice so that they would be life size as well. This game is a real hit for the kids. I would develop some kind of more detailed rule bookmark to hand out for my next go around at this next summer just due to many questions that the kids had from rules that the original board game has that I didn’t realize.
JENGA
For Jenga what you will need is 42 soda boxes (if you want extras, which I recommend get a few more), brown craft paper, enough to cover 42 soda boxes, and lots and lots of heavy duty clear tape.
It is very important to take the extra time to wrap each block very carefully so that it will stay nice and neat for the life of the game.
It is semi difficult to get the soda boxes if you are not a can soda drinker. I reached out to my Youth Advisory Council Moms and I was very lucky to be inidated with lots of soda boxes, YAY! So that’s the best part is that they are donated so no $$ spent 🙂