Working at a children’s board game company, we get a lot of opportunities to work on cool projects that inspire and uplift kids. Most recently, we partnered with the San Francisco Children’s Creativity Museum, as part of a 6 month exhibit they were doing on games. We donated several of our giant-sized games for free play in the entry room and they made big, instructional signs for us. It was fun to see the games in a structured exhibit environment — as opposed to the usual chaotic, high-energy events I attend (I’m talking about you, Gen Con). The CCM certainly has a high level of energy too, but its more focused on the act and artistry of creation.
In addition to the games donated to be put on exhibit, we also put on a two part workshop based on two of our most popular titles: Rally Up! and Fast Flip. During this workshop we helped kids at the museum create their own games with only paper, markers, scissors and stickers. The goal of the project was to inspire kids, and to show them how easy and fun it is to make their own games.
Our retail version of Fast Flip, features a deck of 54 cards with 15 pictures on each card. The goal is to find the right match between the back of one card and the front of another card. For our simplified DIY version, we reduced the number of pictures on each card from 15 to 3, and we gave the kids a set of stickers to put on.
While some kids worked on making their own Fast Flips, we had two other tables set up for the Rally Up! project. Rally Up! is a game of categories, where each card has a picture of something from a specific category. When two cards (or more) that show the same category are flipped up, the first player to call that category scores them.
For our Rally Up! project, we had kids draw their own cards. They were allowed to come up with whatever category they chose and then draw pictures that fell into those categories. It was interesting to discover that many of the categories chosen by the children were categories in our retail version of the game as well. Like…
Fruits
Monsters
Candies
After combining all of the drawings from the two workshops (and removing some categories that only had a few images), we were able to create the final game by adding titles to each card + creating category cards that showed all the different images of each category (to help with identification during the game).
Here’s the completed game: Rally Up! Museum Game Category Cards
And some of our favorite contributions:
If you want to create your own games at home, just print the blank sheets in the materials section and follow our instructions!
DIY Rally Up! Instructions
Materials:
Colored Pens or Pencils
Scissors
- Pick a category (ex. Fruit)
- Draw a few pictures of objects that fall in that category (ex. Watermelon, Pineapple, Cherries)
- Do this for as many categories as you like, we recommend doing at least 5 categories with about 4 objects in each category
- Cut out your cards, shuffle and play!
*Download the rules from our website if you don’t already know how to play Rally Up! http://blueorangegames.com/download-rules
DIY Fast Flip Instructions
Materials:
Stickers
Scissors
- Cut out as many cards as you want to make (we highly recommend you do this first)
- Put one sticker on each card
- Match it, put the same sticker on again
- Put a new, different sticker on each card (Now that you have 3 stickers on each card, flip them over!)
- Put one sticker on the back of each card
- Make sure all your cards face the same way, shuffle and play!
*Download the rules from our website if you don’t already know how to play Fast Flip http://blueorangegames.com/download-rules