… A Brief Overview

This is my first proper post since the end of the Twelve Games of Christmas and I’m going to keep it short. The purpose of this post is to properly introduce my idea for the Games You Can Make At Home series of mini-posts that will be going up this year.

My inspiration for this came from two different places; about two years ago I bought a book in the Oxfam shop I worked in called Play The Game, which is literally a book in which every page, or double page spread is a game that you can play. This, to me, was a fantastic idea, as it provides at least fifty games that take up all the storage space of one large, hardcover book – genius! The second place inspiration came from was my husband – a few months ago he asked me to make him a Snakes and Ladders game for some of the kids in the class he was working in at the time (he’s training to be a teacher), and whilst making those boards I suddenly thought, “hey, this is a great way to save space if you live in a tiny house/flat but love games!” (at the time we were looking at moving into a very tiny flat) and so this mini-series was born.

At the moment my aim is for one of these posts to go up every month. I think this is a good amount of posts considering that this year should also (fingers crossed) hold the Discworldathon posts in addition to the regular, once a week reviews, which will hopefully be going up again from this coming Sunday.

How Are These Posts Going To Work?

Good question! I’m still kinda working that out, so I think the format of the posts is likely to change over the first few until I find the structure I like most. But the plan is to keep it reasonably simple, the posts won’t be that long and they will quite simply include a list of things you need, a brief background on the game (for those who are interested) and then a step-by-step instructions list, with accompanying photos.

If They’re Short, Why Only One A Month?

It’s quite likely that none of you were actually considering that question, but nonetheless I’m going to answer it. There are two reasons, the first is previously stated – there should be plenty of other posts going up around these ones, meaning that I won’t necessarily have time for more than one a month. The second reason is that I have to research each game for copyright reasons. I have to make sure that the writing and publishing of a post about recreating that particular game will not infringe any copyright laws, and that takes a little time.

Lastly…

The first post for this series will be going up tomorrow, and the subject game is Snakes and Ladders. This post has only the final product pictures in it, as I had the idea for this mini-series of posts as I finished making those. So please forgive me and don’t forget that there will be more photos in all the next posts!