This whole tradition of playing a game with our nieces and nephews at Christmas started in 2014. Last minute, a few days before Christmas, we decided to do something special and we put together a super basic game where the kids would complete fun challenges to move forward to the center of a board and get a chocolate Santa Claus.

For this one, we downloaded clip arts from the internet and designed a super simple board that we printed on plain paper with our ink jet printer.

Using Excel, we created a list of questions and challenges organized by difficulty level. Here’s a small sample below.

We enlarged the Excel sheet cells and printed the questions of ice-blue, red, and green cardstock to make the cards. We had 1 path on the board for each color as we were playing with 3 kids of very different ages. The easy questions were for a 3-year-old who liked Cars and Marvel, the medium questions were for a 5-year-old who liked Frozen and My Little Pony, and the hard questions were for a 12-year-old who liked baking.

The beauty of this game is that the gameplay was super simple and it didn’t have loop holes. It was easy to explain and the fun was focused on completing the challenges like singing a song or putting marshmallows in a bowl on your head. These are important notes to remember for complex games.

We got a few chocolates from the dollar store and each time they completed a challenge, they could add a chocolate to their Christmas-themed wallet. At the end, they got a quarter, then a dollar, and finally their chocolate Santa Clause.

This is what started it all. We created 3 more games after that, each one crazier than the last, and we are now working on a 5th one.

What’s your favourite type of game and what did you enjoy playing most as a kid?