Cut out a large square of cardboard from your cereal box or whatever and draw a line inside the outer edge to create a border. Then divide the border into squares like this. A traditional Monopoly board has 40 evenly-sized squares altogether, like this one, but if you want you can have a random number of different-sized squares. It’s up to you!

Each square represents a place, so think about places in your town, or places you wish were in your town and put them in – include places like veggie/vegan cafes and shops like ‘The Loving Hut’ and ‘Infinity Foods’ in this one, and places you enjoy going to like the cinema, the park and the pier. Don’t forget to put ‘GO’ in one corner and a few ‘chance’ squares. The original Monopoly also has fines on some squares like ‘income tax’ but you can make up your own like we have with ‘bus fare’ and ‘new shoes’. Just free your imagination and run with it!

You need play money for monopoly so you can make some fake paper money or you can make coins. We made coins by finding whatever coins we had lying around and making rubbings of them with our crayons. Then we stuck them on cardboard and cut them out – or the other way around but that’s twice as much cutting!!

We found an odd assortment of coins including a commemorative £5 coin and an out of date ha’penny – anything goes when you’re making it up yourself!

Now that you’ve finished your board and you know what each place is, you need to make property cards – one for each place (don’t include fines/go/free parking/free cup of tea and the like). You need to decide on a purchase price for each place and a landing fine to be charged to other players that land on it. Bear in mind what denominations of money you’ve made when you decide on prices but don’t be too serious about it – we went crazy and our landing fines were often higher than the purchase prices! Just have fun with it.

There are also in Monopoly ‘Community Chest’ and ‘Chance’ cards. Your game doesn’t have to have these but it’s good to have some kind of ‘chance’ spaces around your board (as indicated earlier) which you can give any name you like. In our game these spaces are called ‘Family Treasure’ and ‘?’. Now you need to make cards for players to pick up if they land on these spaces. You can write something good or something bad on these cards (for eg the player has won something, or has to pay something) – but again, just use your imagination, it can be anything you want.