Giant Connect 4
Click here to see the intro and the game in action
I love good Sunday School games and when I saw the idea for the giant Connect 4 that James Wang from NextLevelKidMin sent out I just HAD to try it! When we did we were very pleasantly surprised at just how much the kids loved this game! We have played it several times now and the kids haven’t come close to being tired of it yet.
I will not go into details about the actual building of this game because there are quite a few very good resources already out there on the web that you can check out. You can see the links I used below:
I wanted mine to be as big as I could make it out of a couple of piece of plywood and so I ended up with one that was 4 feet tall by around 6 feet wide. Your typical Connect 4 board is 7 holes wide by 6 holes tall as was ours. The game pieces themselves were 7” in diameter and the holes in the plywood were 6” in diameter. I cut out the pieces with a circle jig I made for my bandsaw and the holes in the sheet of plywood with a jigsaw although I just saw someone doing it much better with a router and a circle cutting jig (see Link 3 above).
A couple of things I made mistakes on:
- I made the pieces that separated the front and back sheets of plywood a bit too thick which occasionally allows the game pieces to go behind each other… this is really annoying and I fixed it for the most part by putting a circle of duct tape around the outside edge of each game piece. This also helped cover up any splinters and make them safer for the kids to hold.
- I used brad nails that were too small and not enough glue to hold to the front and back pieces of plywood to the dividers. I should have put a few screws in to make sure it didn’t start to separate.
- BIG MISTAKE: Instead of making a release on the bottom of the game for the pieces to fall out, I made the entire thing able to swivel upside down to dump the pieces back out the top. This seems like a good idea but the board is so big and heavy that the bolts weren’t up to the task long term and have bent significantly. Allowing it to swivel also has made the whole thing wobbly. Securing it to the sides is a much more stable and long-term solution.
We found that you can use this in more than just a 1 on 1 setting. We used it for a class of over 100 by playing the boys against the girls and labeling the rows at the top 1 through 7. A representative from each section came up and depending on whose turn it was, we allowed that section to relay their preferred row to their rep. The rep decided which voice they would listen to and then would drop it in the appropriate slot. This went back and forth until we had a winner!
If you want to tie it to a lesson, you can talk about how you need to be careful WHICH voice you listen to.
Try this out… it is a lot of work but you will not regret any of the time you spend on it.
