Last Christmas I went to my friends house for a bit of a girls night and we had a lovely home-cooked meal, drank a little wine, did some Christmas crafts and then played board games for the rest of the night!
I know, how rock and roll am I?
One of the games we played was Rapidough and I loved it – as I was playing it, I was thinking how I absolutely HAD to go out and buy this for us to play as a family.
The next morning however, when I was trying to describe how much fun it was to the kids, they just gave me a look and said it sounded a bit babyish! I tried to talk them round but they weren’t having any of it so I decided against buying it, especially when I saw the price tag of £24.99 in ToysRUs the following week!
Fast forward to now and we’ve started having a bit of a family games night on a Saturday night instead of a movie night (we can never agree on what to watch) so we’ve been on the lookout for new board games to add to our collection. Last week, we were in Tesco and they had some Play dough reduced which Miss Frugal suggested we buy to see if we could make our own version of Rapidough.
I’ve no idea what changed her mind (although it could have been the fact that every time we’re choosing what to play, I sigh dramatically and say that I wish we had Rapidough ;-)) but we bought the play dough and came home to see what we could do.
Here’s what we came up with:
What you need to play Frugal Rapidough
1 tub of playdough per team (they all need to be the same colour)
A smartphone/ tablet
A cupcake corer (ours was from Tesco and it was about £2 if I remember)
The rules to Frugal Rapidough
Divide into two teams.
Each team has a pot of playdough.
The idea of the game is that one person is given a word (more about that in a minute) and has to use their playdough to model that word in any way they can and everyone else has to guess what it is. We don’t allow any words to be made out of the playdough, any gestures or pointing or any clues away from what the person is doing to the playdough itself.
Whoever wins the round by guessing correctly gets to use the cupcake corer to take a piece of the other teams playdough to add to their own blob of playdough.
We always let the person who guessed the answer steal the playdough rather than anyone else doing it for them because they only get one chance so if they don’t fill the cupcake corer fully then they’ve only got themselves to blame!
The winner is the team with the most playdough at the end.
Sometimes, one team is on fire and it’s clear who’s the winner as one team doesn’t have enough playdough left to model when it’s their turn whereas the other team has a huge pile. Other times, it’s pretty close and we have to weigh the piles to confirm who the winner is! You might like to set a timer so you don’t end up playing all night!
There’s a couple of sites I use on my phone to generate random words as we’re playing – I like this one best as you can set the difficulty level of the word. We simply pass the phone to whoever is taking their turn and they have up to three chances to generate a word as they might not like the first word. You could be stricter and just say they have to do the first word.
There are also sites that you can use to print out cards for games like this but as I’m playing too, I thought it would give me a head start on guessing if I was the one who had seen the cards. The phone option is so much easier!
