7A-6 Pin Board Board Game

    My Maker project was to make a board game out of some wood and a pin board. I decided to make this project, partly because I am not very experienced in building and I needed something that would be fairly easy, and also because I like board games.

    I started this project for a school maker faire, but unfortunately, I did not finish it by the time of the maker faire because I was recruited by my math teacher to help him get the ERB tests ready. But I hope to finish the project some time, and I already learned some important things from the project so far.

   One challenge that faced me during this project was that I really do not know how to construct many things. I had trouble figuring out how to drill the pieces together, but a teacher helped me figure out how to put the pieces together. Eventually, we just decided to use wood glue.

   My full plan was to make a wooden box and use a piece of pin board for the top. There would be a few pegs, made of the sharp half of a pencil. These would act as the moving piece for characters across the game board. There would be two hinges on one side of the box attaching the pin board, and on the other side a latch to open and close the top. Inside of the box is where you would keep the pegs and the deck of cards. You can make the game rules whatever you want. My rules were that player start on one end of the board, and each player gets their fraction of the deck of cards, and they put down cards one by one and whoever puts down the highest on gets to go forward, and whoever makes it to the other side of the board wins the round.

   The most exciting thing I learned about was how to use a jigsaw. It was much easier than I thought, and I managed to cut all my pieces using it.

 
    If I had more time, obviously, I would have finished building the board. But if I had more time after that, I would have made a more complex set of rules. I could have colored in the board to create a scene, or make my own kind of cards made specifically for the game. Some time in the summer I could work on the game on my own time, outside of school, just for fun.

   Estimated cost of project: About $10.00 for a sheet of plywood (just a guess)
                                                About $3.50 for a latch (to open and close the board)
                                                About $3.50 for two hinges
                                                About $10.00 for a bag of screws
                                             +About $4.05 for a bottle of Gorilla Wood glue
                                          ___________________________________________
                                               $31.05 estimated total cost

   I did not have any outside inspiration for the project initially, but the concept of using pegs, a deck of cards, and and a board for the pegs to go in, is sort of similar to cribbage. If your are looking for more inspiration on making a peg board board game, check out some of the homemade boards here: Etsy homemade cribbage boards. A lot of the boards at the link are a lot more polished and refined than mine, more difficult to make, and more expensive than mine, but it's just inspiration. You can make your board anything you can imagine and achieve with your own hands.