How to fit a games compendium into 2 CD cases and a pill box!

A few coloured pencils come in handy too!!

Electronic entertainment is all very well and has it’s time and place, but if you are going on holiday surely it is about family time, but how do you introduce family time into being stuck in due to inclement weather, or you are delayed at the airport or even worse you spend an unscheduled extra week away when a volcano grounds flights on the last day of your hols and you have spent up!!!! (another story but boy was I glad I had the games kit with me!!!) Ok so all this came about when I was about to take my kids on their first ever holiday abroad, and therefore their first flights.   Well I wasn’t sure how they would react so I thought distraction would be the name of the game (scuz the pun) if there were any problems.   A desk calendar (the type that use CD cases) was my inspiration and so I now have a complete compendium that is small enough to fit in my hand luggage (and yes although those kids are now teenagers the games still go with us).  

The first thing is to make a template so you know stuff will fit in – as my CD case was a calendar the pieces of card with the months on were perfect so I had a ready made one.   Paper games was the obvious place to start, On my PC, I set up a naughts and crosses template, one for battle ships, connect four, and then squares oh and did a set of rules too to save the arguing!!, I painstakingly arrived at the right dimensions for everything by printing and checking against the sizing template.   My next natural progression was card games, as a family we never go anywhere without at least one pack of cards between us, so besides our usual games I thought it would be good to try some new ones, I hunted for games I thought we would like to try, typed out the rules and added them to the case, then added a few simple card tricks for good measure.   Dice games was when I came up with the pill box, because obviously dice won’t fit in the CD case……… well I had a pill box for my vitamins and when I was trying to decide where to keep the dice, thought I could sacrifice a compartment and put them in there. Thanks to the internet I found some 9 mm dice, I tend to take 6 with us as quite a few games use more than 1 die, Yahtzee being one of them, I printed the rules and set up a template for the Yahtzee score sheet, I later found a dice within a dice on a trip to London so that goes with us too. Needless to say those pill box compartments proved to be just the ticket so now I have had to move the vitamins out!!!

I then made A Ludo board, chess and draughts board, backgammon board, and Othello board(the backgammon and othello boards being done in 2 halves so the playing area is a better size), all just on light weight card that can be reprinted if they get tatty, one of those obvious things to mention here (so obvious you might not think of it!!!) is you can place the game boards so they are facing outwards from the back of the cd case, you then have a solid surface to play on and no boards blowing about!!! (I have cut the two piece boards so that the middle is right at the edge of the paper then you can use both cases together - you have to put up with a small crack down the middle but it is manageable)

 I have a collection of counters – coloured buttons for some games and small chess pieces from a cheap travel chess, the Othello and draughts caused a problem until I found a craft punch that cuts out 14mm circles, a sheet of crafts card, coloured on one side and white on the other has provided me with a stock of easily replaceable counters!!! – I guess for me the replaceable element is the best thing as the set isn’t ruined if something goes astray, everything is printable and replaceable – I had even included a set of printable dominos, then I found a set of plastic ones that are 27 x 13mm but better still I was then lucky enough to find a set of playing cards that are dominos so we have game rules for those too. We Now have 25+ games with us when we travel!!!.

Print off a few Sudoku puzzles,(for young children a couple of small pictures to colour in is useful too) and don’t forget some blank sheets for doodling and scoring!!! I guess when I get a chance I should put all the templates as PDF files on etsy, to save everybody else the trouble of setting stuff up!!!