The Forever Friends Game

The Forever Friends game evolved into more than just a trivia game as we went a long and kept getting new ideas. It's a basic board game where your piece travels a path from start to finish. We added a couple of bridges for the "Candyland" effect. But it has several types of spaces to land on and cards to draw.

We started off by buying a notebook and jotting down tons of bits of trivia that we could think of. Alex, Jessica and I all contributed to this as we added things from our memory. Then, we started scanning back through all the books for other bits of info to add. We even got a little help from Robin on a fun bit of info that we could only remember part of. She steered us in the right direction to find the answer. (We were looking in the wrong series.) We ended up with pages and pages of questions. We now have over 200 trivia questions and we will have more when the final Katie book comes out next month.

I decided to make things easy by buying a pack of business card paper and making our cards using Word. (Let me tell you that is much easier than all the cutting involved with Gunnopoly! and the cards are much nicer!)

The symbol for the trivia cards is a traffic light. In the books, the traffic light takes a roll in the pacing of Christy and Todd's relationship so we thought it would be fun to use that as a place to stop and ask questions. When a player stops on a traffic light on the board, they have the player on their right draw a card and read them the question. If they get it right, they stay where they are. If they get it wrong, they go back to the last space they were on.



Then, I thought that we needed to include some aspect of geography into the game. These characters travel a lot and so many cool places are mentioned. So, I started searching for pictures of places they had been and made our "Sightseer" cards. They each have a picture of something that one or more of the characters has seen. When a player draws one of these cards, they try to identify the place and then how it was mentioned in the books. These cards will be a little harder since a lot of people don't have my compulsion to research places and events mentioned in fictional books. LOL So, if the player gets this card right, they get another roll of the dice. If they don't know, they just stay where they are till their next turn.



Then, since the books are all about friends and relationships and because we just love to talk about the stories, we added another element. The Forever Cards. These cards have open ended questions. Some have questions about the books, some are questions about friendship, some are a bit thought provoking. Just a nice way to get the girls talking. The player is encouraged to have the other players answer the question as well. This game brings to mind a game that one of the characters plays with his family a lot. And it will include some questions from that game as well. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, so the player just remains there till their next turn.


When a player lands on a Memorial Stone space, they will draw a card that has a scripture verse that was used somewhere in the books. To help the girls hide these verses in their hearts, they will have to illustrate the verse in anyway that they want. By acting it out, drawing it out, making a rebus puzzle, etc.

There are also various stops along the way that have instructions to follow in play. In the this picture of the board, you can see a sightseer spot (the double decker bus - all of the sightseer spots have some travel type sticker on them. ), an instruction spot, and on the right, you can catch a glimpse of a Forever space.



In this picture you can see one of our playing pieces, Clover, Katie's second car.


The final destination for our game is Hawaii. Partly because so many of the characters go there and it is a desirable destination. But, mostly, because of a wonderful gospel illustration that is used in the first Christy book that uses Hawaii to explain Heaven.

The end of our game also has a bit of a "Sorry"/"Parcheesi" aspect that John doesn't like and gave us a few suggestions for changing, but Alex and I kind of like, so for now it stays. We have it set up so that if you don't roll the right number to land on the "Go to Hawaii" space, you have to go back the number of spaces left over on your roll. Which prolongs the game and gives the potential for more cards to be drawn. Depending on your luck, you can be in the final stretch for several rolls (It took Jessica about 5-6 rolls in our test game) or just a few (I made it in one or two rolls and beat poor Jessica who had been there awhile.) Maybe a little aggravating, but we kind of like the extra challenge and the fact that it slows the game down some and gets more cards drawn.

The picture below shows the board with several of our playing pieces. We are still looking for a 68 red Mustang and a yellow Toyota truck.

The game.

We had a lot of fun coming up with questions, designing the board, decorating it and coming up with game aspects. We look forward to the party and sharing this game with friends.

Gunnopoly

Alex and I have fallen in love with books by Robin Jones Gunn. If you recall, I reviewed her book, Praying For Your Future Husband, this past summer and then got curious about the "Christy books" she kept mentioning and started reading them and then didn't stop until I had sped through the whole set of books. Christy, Sierra and Katie. I have since read all of the Glenbrooke books, a couple of the "stand alones" (Robin's books never seem completely stand alone, there always tends to be some connection to other books. We love that!), started on the Sisterchicks and even got the Rosey Posey books. :-)

I suggested that Alex read them and she is hooked also! I love this because she was the only one of my children who would not read for fun. She did get hooked on The Outsiders, which was a favorite of mine as a teen, but not something I want her spending ALL her time reading. There are other great books. And books with better morals. So, I was thrilled when she got hooked on these books with such wonderful messages in them. She proceeded to read three Forever Friends series, Glenbrooke and more in very quick order just like I did. In fact she has read some of the books I haven't gotten to yet.

Jessica is also working her way through the series. (She is my big reader and normally reads very fast, but she has a very busy schedule this year.) Alex discovered that a couple of her friends were fans of the books too. She is now loaning her books to other friends and getting them hooked also. Since so many of her friends have read and loved the books, we came up with the idea to have a Forever Friends party and that we needed to create a trivia game based on the books.

The first idea I had was to use a pre-made customizable game board and found a "Make Your Own - opoly" board on Amazon and purchased it. But it didn't quite meet the "trivia" aspect that we were wanting. So, we decided to just make our own game board for the trivia game and have a monopoly style game as well.

We plan to hold our party on July 27, Christy's birthday, and have everyone dress as their favorite character - among other ideas inspired from the books. More on that when party time comes. But, I thought I would blog about our games for now since we have had so much fun making them. First Gunnopoly.

They provide you with a board that's pretty generic and empty to start with.
They also give you blank playing pieces, dice and "houses".


The set comes with a disk from which you print of instructions on how to edit and create your game. Included are some worksheets to work your ideas out before you start playing with the editor on the computer.

Once you know what you want to put on all your spaces and pieces, you head to the computer and start editing.
Here you can see our board starting to take shape on the computer.
You click on each section of the board on the screen and edit with words and pictures.
You can use their stock graphics or upload your own.
You can even use one of their 4 game scenarios.
After it was all edited, I started printing. They supply the sticker paper and the card stock for labeling the box and the board, and making the deed cards and game pieces. We supply the paper for the money. I had purchased a pack of colored paper for the money, but turns out this game is all about ink usage! It uses a lot of ink! I had to supply 20 sheets of white paper and a bunch of ink!


This sheet has the stickers to label the box so that it has the custom game name.
It also has the stickers to apply to the game pieces.

This is one of the sheets of stickers that you use to edit the board.

Deed Cards

Money

The playing instructions and the "good news", "bad news" cards.
You can edit the actual cards and change the titles of them,
but they don't let you change the names of the cards on the board.
I will probably just make my own stickers to do that, because we don't like the "good" and "bad" names. We renamed ours "God Thing" and "Oooh!!" "God Thing" is a phrase used often in the books and "Oooh!!" is one of our words. When Alex was reading the 11th Christy book,
I came in and asked which one she was reading and said "Oooh!!" when she showed me because I knew she would not like the ending. Ever since then, we call it the "Oh book".
We thought it would be funny to make that our "bad news" card name. :-)

Then we did lots of cutting and sticking.
The finished board and pieces look like this.


One of the sections of the board.
We used a variety of places mentioned in the books.


The playing pieces with cars that the characters' drove.

The box.


It was a lot of fun to put this together and brainstorm ideas for the places and the cards and such. I hope it will be just as fun to play.