We're totally in love with board games (well, games of any description really) and Kevan and Viv have done such a great job of including absolutely everything you need to create your own awesome game ideas. All you really need to bring to the table is yourself, your besties or kids, and your imagination.
We read through the whole book before embarking on a project we'd had on the backburner for a long time - a strange board game of sheer chance where your aim is to make your way around a supermarket, snagging as many goodies as possible but avoiding the wandering grannies who inhabit the store, and will nag you to bits to go and pick their prescriptions up for them - thus robbing you of the chance of nabbing more groceries than your opponent.
We worked on several versions of the game, inspired in some part by horrible shopping trips we'd had in the past - and amazingly the game held together pretty well. So well in fact that we still dig it out from time to time to play it.
We devised several other board games and a couple of card games too. I firmly believe that there's no better bonding experience for a family than to tough it out designing a game, then of course playing each other at it.
Certainly a better way of deciding who gets to do the washing up than tossing a coin.
Original review links and articles:
ReadItDaddy's Second Book of the Week - Week Ending 20th September 2019: "Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz (Pavilion Children's Books)
Building our own board game with "Board Games to Create and Play" by Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz (Pavilion Children's Books)