A Fun Valentine's Day Gift for the Board Game Aficionado

You may absolutely adore Valentine's Day- the celebration of love- the hearts, sparkles, and chocolate abounding. 

Or you may completely detest this Hallmark Holiday, obviously used to commercialize something meaningful into a box of chocolate and red roses. 

I guess I fall somewhere in between. I do celebrate Valentine's Day but for the past four years it has been with homemade gifts and/or dinners. I thought I would share a really fun, inexpensive gift to make if either of you love board games! 

A personalized version of Monopoly! All you need is a foam poster board, a sharpie, scissors (and a box cutter if possible), a printer, glue and colored paper. Here's what I did:

Create your board!

• Using a regular Monopoly board as a template, cut a square out of the foam poster board. Using a box cutter makes a cleaner cut. 
• Draw your spaces around the board, in pencil then with Sharpie. 
• Create your logo in the center, mimicking the official name and trademark information. 

Choose your properties

• I incorporated places that we met, favorite date spots, places we lived, where we worked, etc. I printed small photos that represented each place to glue onto their space on the board. I listed the values of each space as represented on my regular Monopoly board. 
• For railroads, I used the cities which we have lived in. Instead of Go, I made a Home space. Instead of Jail - the Doghouse. For Free Parking, I made a little Mt Bonnell space, a famous Austin lookout. I replaced the luxury tax with a credit card bill, and income tax with a tithe. 
• I glued strips of colored paper on each section- you could also use different colored Sharpies and just color the tops! 
• For houses and hotels, just cut uniform shapes from colored paper- quick and easy!

Create Chance and Community Chest cards

• In my game Chance became "Get Lucky" cards and included an equal number of good and bad personalized fortunes and consequences. 
• Community Chest became Family Jewels. I read through the official Monopoly versions and modernized/personalized them! 

Print or create monopoly money

• I printed my own money by searching each monopoly denomination in a Google image search, re-sizing them all to be the same, creating sheets in a power point file, printing and cutting each out. 
• You can always just sub in the money from your official board game though and save yourself some time!

Don't forget your game pieces

• Create or find an item that represents each of you!

This project does take quite a bit of work, so be prepared to put in some time to make it perfect. I loved reminiscing about our relationship as I put this together. When I gifted it, we played a round and it was so fun to read through the cards and see how it all worked in actual game-play. And now, the board makes an adorable keepsake! 

Have you ever given or received a homemade Valentine's Day gift?