I made a board game! Not like, professionally or anything… But literally made and wrote and crafted every part of it by hand! All in all, this took about 2 and a half years. It would have taken me less time but I took long breaks, as I had… whatever the crafty equivalent of writers block was, haha!

Since my college days, I’ve been in the habit of taking progress pictures and talking about each step, so I will do that here. I thought of this game when I was young and finally got around to making it. All ideas are mine and mine alone. Thank you!

I don’t have any pictures of the box before I cut it up and crafted the actual silhouette of the board game box. But for reference, it was an adidas shoe box, slightly bigger than a standard shoe box. But I made all the inserts and make the first few little characters. Red, blue, yellow and green ones.

This was when I had done the first part of the box. I put the title of the game in rainbow coloured and a baseball… court? Pitch? I’m sure it’s called a pitch. I also put the title around the edge of the lid of the box in a repeating pattern.

Once I had finished the lid of the box, it was into making the first of the many cards. There’s a total of five different cards, four being these ones above. They range from Batting Card, which is the positive of the cards, which is green. Then the yellow, orange and red cards are bad outcomes, getting progressively worse.

These are the balls that each player has to collect ten of per each of their characters, so forty in total. Originally I was going to colour them with pencils but it looked a little too dull so I changed my mind half way through and went over them in coloured pens.

I then coloured a background around each of the balls in a grey pen and cut each one out which was very tedious but we all know I love tedious stuff!

These are the four different types of cards, from best outcomes to worst, they go: Batting Card, Curve Ball, Foul Ball & Strike Out. Each card has the potential to take away, or add to, your ball collection, as well as other positive or negative outcomes. Each card was drawn, coloured and cut out by hand, it was one of the biggest parts of the whole project.

Back to the balls, as I had to make significantly more of them. I then cut out the new balls, adding them to the original collection. I backed each ball onto its corresponding coloured card and put them in laminator.

Just some more pictures of when I was making the four types of action cards. I coloured different direction of lines on each card so all cards look slightly different but still match each other. Once I finished them there was about fifteen cards per pile, with about sixty cards in total.

I was really making up a lot of the rules and gameplay as I went along and after I had finished the first sets of cards I wanted to add another type of card into the game which was more of a trivia style card. These pictures were when I was creating the front of them.

After that I made the reverse side of the cards. These all contain different baseball trivia questions at varying levels. Blue was the easiest, followed by green, then yellow, and then red. These cards will be shuffled and each difficulty can let you be rewarded with different amounts of balls.

1 ball for the blue cards

2 balls for the green cards

3 balls for the yellow cards

4 balls for the red cards

After I had coloured both the front and the back of the Time Out Trivia cards I backed the front part onto blue card, cut them out and then stuck the side with the questions in the back of each card, there was about 60 of these cards in total.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to laminate these cards or not but since I had laminated both the balls and the other sets of cards at this point I decided to laminate them. I put them all in laminating sheets, fed each one through the laminator, and then meticulously cut out each one.

Then I relayed because each person playing plays with four players/characters, and each of these four characters have to collect 10 balls each. I made four mats for each of the players. Four red, four yellow, four green and four blue. These mats are to be placed in a line in front of each person playing to keep track of how many balls each of their characters have.

Finally, the last thing I made was the board. I did this last as I wanted to know what cards I would need to make space for on the board. To make sure everything on the board was even, I sectioned the board into little squares to make the designing easier!

The first picture above was the original layout of the board but I quickly changed it to the second picture as there was too many action spaces, so I redid a few of them to blank forces. I didn’t want them to be totally blank spaces so I made it a purple background with a pink baseball. When a player lands in these spaces nothing happens.

Finally, my board game is finished. I did make a whole YouTube video about it on my channel! I am so so proud of it. It did take the better half of about two years but that’s because I kept taking breaks for months at a time.

I hope everyone enjoyed reading!