DIY Monster race board game

Trying to get into the Halloween mood here, also trying to keep it fun and not scary for Nico. So I thought I would make a little game for him based on a game he owns, “Allez les escargots” (“Snail’s Pace Race”). It’s easy to play, even for a just turned 3 yo, and fun for older kids too, heck we like it, lol. Six colored snails, 2 colored dice, roll them and whatever color is on top, it’s that snail that moves by one space (or two if both dice land on the same color). You can play alone and guess which will win or with as many as 6 players where each could pick a color to assign to themselves. He likes it, but the rows for the snails are all the same colors and depending how you are positioned it gets confusing. So for making the Halloween version of this, I went with a color for each row. Here is how we made it, no patterns to give as it all depends on the size of your monsters (pompoms).

Take fairly big pompoms, googly eyes, mini pompoms and wool to make the monsters. Here are pics of how I did the hair. Nico didn’t help with those since it’s very small pieces but an older child could have fun making this and getting creative. I went with the pompoms I have, any color works really as they are monsters

For the board I used a foam poster board that I had Nico paint 2 shades of green to represent a pumpkin patch. The size of it depends on your pompom size again, I lined up the 6 pompoms next to each other, leaving a little space between each and also leaving a space around the board to be able to decorate it.

For the stones (for the paths) I used markers of each of the monsters’ color and drew on label stickers. We went with the size of the pompoms and free handed stones with a pencil, cut them up and stuck them on the board. We placed them before hand to make sure it all fit well then we stuck them one by one trying to stay straight. After, we thought about the fact that pompoms roll, so we tried velcro, but that stuck too much so I used a self-sticking magnet sheet that I cut in little squares and we just applied them to the bottoms of the pompoms and on top of the stone stickers. Those are easy to move and stick for Nico and it prevents the monsters from rolling or falling off if we knock the board a little. They may be strong enough to play in the car but I’m not sure, if you try it let me know please For the start point, we used little ghost stickers and for the finish we used candy filled pumpkins, as if the ghosts had been trick or treating through the pumpkin patch. We used pumpkin foam shapes and stickers to decorate the patch.

When we said we had a new game for him to play, he was very excited and was so giddy when he saw it, all the pics are blurry, lol. We played it twice in a row, the first result is above, we thought for sure green was gonna win as he was ahead the whole game but nope, yellow snuck in there The second game I asked him which he thought was gonna win before we started, he said black, guess which one won…?

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it
to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations

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