Boredom Buster Ball Game

This game was fun to make and is fun to play. You can use pretty much any cardboard items you have on hand. Believe it or not I had all items just sitting around! I used the large box as my base and just filled it with random tubes. I didn't actually have enough tubes to fill the box (and with toilet paper being rather important and hard to find at the moment I didn't want to waste any) so I used a larger food container and random box to fill in the gaps.

I had planned to glue the pieces in place but they fit snugly enough so they don't slide around and now if we get bored playing the game we can switch things up a bit my changing around the configuration. I painted the outside of the box and the larger tube, and used some Washi-style tape to go around the rims of each tube for some added flair.

I was struggling with how to assign points to each tube but luckily I found some yard sale stickers and stuck those on each tube. If you make this I encourage you to be creative in putting it all together. You'll be surprised at what you come up with!

Any size and shape cardboard tubes, boxes and pieces

Small balls (we used 8 of varying colors and sizes) They just need to be able to fit into the tubes.

Paint (optional)

I encourage you to be creative with the rules of the game. In our house we used a mix of bouncy balls and Nerf balls. Here are the rules we used:

Each player takes turns throwing the balls into the tubes. We required one bounce. If the ball completely missed the cup it was out of play and the player missed those points. After one player throws all his/her balls and tallies up the total /earned' play passes to the next player. After all players have gone the winner is the one with the most amount of money. I didn't mean for this to be a learning opportunity but it turned out to be a fun adding lesson - a happy accident.

This was fun to make and is fun to play. You can see here that our cat even got into it!