How To Make Your Own Travel Boggle Game (With Polymer Clay)
I’ve always loved a good letter or word game — Scattegories, crosswords, Wordle, etc. So naturally, one of my favorite classic games growing up was Boggle. The basic idea of the game is you roll a series of letter dice and arrange them in a 4 x 4 grid. You then try to make as many words with the letter combinations that you can. The longer the word, the more points you receive!
It’s a super simple game with very little setup required, which is why I thought it might be fun to create my own travel sized game with supplies I already had at home from previous projects! Find out how I made this little travel boggle set with polymer clay in my tutorial below.
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DIY TRAVEL BOGGLE GAME (WITH POLYMER CLAY)
DIY Travel Boggle Game Supplies:
Polymer clay (multiple colors are not necessary, but look cute!)
Oven
White paint pen (extra fine tip) or gel pen
Small box, tin, or jar (I used an old tea tin, but you could use an old Altoid tin, an old candle jar, a small jewelry gift box, etc.)
To begin, pull off small pieces of clay and roll them in your hands to create 16 clay balls. Mine were probably about 3/8” diameter because I wanted my dice to be travel sized. But you can really do whatever size you would like. Just try to make sure they are all of a roughly equal size.
TIP: One way to get a more consistent size is to roll a large piece of clay into a ball and then roll it out on the table to make a snake shape. Now go through and cut equal sized sections of the snake and individually roll those into their own balls.
Next, you are going to form the ball shapes into cube shapes by gently squeezing them between your pointer finger and thumb with both hands, turning the cube as you go to keep each side consistent.
Once you have 16 equal cubes, you will begin using your letter stamps to gently stamp into the clay. You want to press in just enough to leave an imprint but not too far to lose the cube shape. Here are what letters to include on each dice (thanks to this very informative Bananagrammer article!) —
AAEEGN
ABBJOO
ACHOPS
AFFKPS
AOOTTW
CIMOTU
DEILRX
DELRVY
DISTTY
EEGHNW
EEINSU
EHRTVW
EIOSST
ELRTTY
HIMNUQu
HLNNRZ
Now it is time to bake your clay! Bake the clay following the instructions on the polymer clay wrapper. I used Sculpey III clay, so I preheated my oven to 275 degrees F. Then I baked my cubes on a flat baking sheet for about 30 minutes (the instructions said to do 15 minutes per 1/4 in and my cubes ended up being closer to 1/2 in size).
Allow the cubes to fully cool and then your clay should be hardened. Next, go in with a very fine tip white paint pen to carefully draw in the letter outline inside the imprint to make the letter easier to see. I had to use a white gel pen in some situations where the imprint was too thin for the paint pen to fit.
Let the paint dry and your Boggle dice are ready to play!
THE RULES OF BOGGLE
To play the game you will begin by giving each player a piece of scrap paper and a pen/pencil (or you could just use your NOTES app on your phone if you are on the go). Pour all 16 letter cubes into your cup or container. Shake it up and then roll them out onto a table. Quickly push the dice into a 4x4 grid arrangement.
Next, you will set a timer (on your phone or an hourglass timer works well) for three minutes. Players will now begin to search for words within the grid, but the trick is that the letters of the word must be touching either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. And you cannot use the same letter dice multiple times within the same word.
Players will write down all the words they can find on their own paper. Words must be at least three letters long. Any word that can be found in a basic English dictionary can be used. When the timer goes off, all players will put down their pen/pencils. Then you will take turns reading off the words you found.
If two players have any of the same words, they should be crossed off. Any unique words that are found count for points. Point are determined by the length of each unique word. So players will count up how many letters are in each word and award themselves points depending on the word length:
3 letter words = 1 point
4 letter words = 1 point
5 letter words = 2 points
6 letter words = 3 points
7 letter words = 5 points
8+ letter words = 11 points
(and the QU cube counts as 2 letters, FYI!)
Each player will total up all their points and the winner of the round is whoever has scored the most points!
Boggle is a great easy game to play and this travel sized version makes it perfect to bring with in your purse for while you’re waiting for your meal at a restaurant or lounging in a park or by the pool.
This project has definitely inspired me to try making other games in the future. What are some of your favorite classic board games? xo Rachael
