For our camping trips this summer, Mindy and I wanted to make a fun rustic game board that would be fun to play while hanging around at the camp ground. We used Wood Connection's shadow boxes and turned it into Checkers on the outside and Backgammon on the inside. Here's how we did it:
Materials:
- 2- 10x14 shadow boxes
- 30 circle pieces (plus extras in case you lose some)
- Paint (We used coral, sea foam, quaker grey, hippo grey)
- sand paper
- dice
- paint brushes
- ruler
- cricut machine to cut out letters
- contact paper
- hinges
- painters tape
- exacto knife
Paint the edges the colors that you want the writing to be in. We chose coral for the backgammon letters and sea foam for the checkers letters.
Cut out backgammon and checkers from the cricut using contact paper. Apply to the sides.
To make sure paint doesn't seep underneath the letters when painting another color over them, use mod podge or the same color of paint and apply to it.
CHECKERS SIDE:
1. paint the top of the boards, the color you want half of the squares to be. We painted this the light gray.
2. Now draw an 8x8 grid. Each of our squares we measured to be 1.5 inches amking the whole board 12x12 inches
3. Tape off the grid.
4. Using a ruler and exacto knife, cut every other square out.
5. Apply paint or mod podge over the top.
6. Paint every side on the outside the darker gray.
7. Peel off tape!
BACKGAMMON SIDE:
1. Paint the outside edges the light gray.
2. Tape off the edges then paint the bottom the dark gray.
3. Once they have dried, draw 6 triangles on each side of the board like so.
4. Tape off every other triangle and paint them coral.
5. Once the coral has dried, tape off the remaining triangles and paint those the seafoam.
6. After everything is done, we used sand paper to rough it up a little to give it a more rustic look.
A few more steps:
- Paint you pieces! We painted half of them coral and half of them seafoam.
- Screw 2 hinges on to the outside so it opens and closes. We got our hinges from Home Depot.
It may be a little labor of love, but we absolutely love how it all turned out!
To learn how to play checkers, go here.
To learn how to play backgammon, go here. Don't forget your dice!
