Photo Post! Pave the Way

*Posted from Ohio! It's great to be back, though short-lived- we're here for 1 week.

Post by Lara, photos by Kevin

13th Sept 2013

During the lull between training the new PCVs and the start of a new school year, we decided to spend the better part of a week creating our very own board game (on rice bags, because they're cheap).  We titled the game "Pave the Way" and the object is to pave roads in Sierra Leone to connect different cities together.  The game is based on Ticket to Ride, an awesome board game in which you lay railroad tracks to connect different cities in a given region (there are different versions for the US, Asia, Europe, etc).  We added a twist to our own game in the form of extra cards that you can purchase and use during a turn to spice the game up a bit.  Here are the steps we took start to finish:

First things first: tracing a map of Sierra Leone onto a plastic bag so I could draw a grid on it and enlarge it.

Next I drew the big grid on our 2 rice bags

Done with the outline of the country! Now to label some major towns and cities...

Here's our completed game board.  If you're familiar with a game called Ticket to Ride, our game is played much the same, but instead of laying railroad tracks you're paving the roads.  Wishful thinking? Um yes.

When the sun goes down and you still have work to do, you work by headlight!  It's not so bad really.

This is me trying to figure out what to put on the "destination" cards.

Pavement cards come in 5 colors and WILD.  We ended up writing the name of the color on the cards later because blue/purple and red/orange were confusing.  Also this makes playing Pave the Way an educational game that promotes literacy! Go us!

Since they color bled through on the color cards, I made a stamp out of a discarded flip flop.

Homemade stamp in action

Then for the back of the destination cards, Kevin made a stamp that's shaped like Sierra Leone

The cards on the playing surface

Each player gets pavement "tiles" to claim the roads they're paving.  We sent the neighbor girls into the bush with the assignment of coming back with several colors of flip flops. Voila!

Cutting pavement tiles from discarded flip flops

Finished pavement tiles! Each player gets 45 pieces

Scoring tokens.  The two big ones are "poda podas" loaded down with cargo. The smaller ones are motorbikes

In our own twist on the game, we created "Eh Bo!" cards that offer extra moves or bonus points.  These require three matching color cards.

The first 8 "Eh Bo!" cards we came up with.  We've altered a few since this and added a few others.

Flip flop strap turned police road block

And here we are playing for the first time!