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August 24, 2010

A Genealogy Board Game for Children: Part 4 - Transportation Cards

I've been busy creating a Genealogy Board Game for my grandchldren this summer. In A Genealogy Board Game For Children Part 1 I explained how I created my Game Board with squares. Part 2 discusses the creation of the actual game board and Part 3 illustrates the UH-OH and CONGRATULATIONS cards I made.

Now to show you the Transportation Cards I created. When a player lands on a Take a Transportation Card square, they choose a card from the pile. Each Transportation Card is about a journey or trip that an ancestor made.

For example, there are cards that talk about ancestors sailing to the New World on specific ships on specific dates. Some cards focus on planned trips or trips that my ancestors made. I tried to be creative in thinking about what constituted a "trip". All the "trip" had to do was feature some type of transportation - horse, car, boat, bungie cord, raft....

Each card has a picture to represent the journey and the explanation below. Transportation cards allow the player to move ahead so many squares.

This is a Transportation Card about the voyage of my Bradt ancestor from Holland to New Netherland (New York) in 1637.
This Transportation Card is about the record setting jump from the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge made by my great-grandfather's brother in 1867.
This card is different again, featuring the proposed trip to visit his mother in Illinois mentioned in a letter dated 1839 written by my great-grandfather Levi Peer.










After creating all the Transportation Cards (I only made 10 for now) I printed them on heavy yellow card stock. I didn't want them to be the same colour as the UH-OH and CONGRATULATIONS cards which I printed on beige card stock.

Next step is to actually play the game! It's still in prototype stage but my grandchildren are with me this week so they are going to be my focus group. We'll play the game and talk about what I can do to make it better, more fun, etc. I want their input and ideas and they've already indicated they are looking forward to playing. I fact they've asked several times since arriving Sunday night.

After we play I can tweak the game and work on the final product. More on that in my next post!

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