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.