Activities & Days Out / 13 May, 2020 / Nanny Anita

How To Make Your Own DIY Table Football Set

At the moment I am really into making our own homemade versions of games like our Scrabble game and tin can stilts. This week we have been making our own table football! The advantage of making our own is that it is small so that it doesn’t take up any room, and YC and EC don’t have to worry about being able to move between using different poles; which they find very difficult to do when we have used full sized ones.

You will need:

• Wooden dowels
• Large shoe box
• Pegs
• Paint
• Paintbushes
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Pencil
• Craft knife
• Ping pong ball
• Glue gun

First things first, make sure your pegs fit onto your wooden dowels or this just won’t work.

Decorate your pegs into football players; we had red for Arsenal and blue for Chelsea. We decorated 6 players for each team, but only ended up using 3 per team.

Then paint your box. Once that has dried you need to cut out two goals at either end of the box, I left them attached at the bottom so that when we have finished playing we can close them up to keep the ball from losing the ball.

This next part requires some accurate measuring or your players are going to end up at an angle. Work out how high your dowel needs to be by placing the peg (on the dowel) at the side of the box, the peg should be just off the ground so that it can swing to and fro easily. Once you have marked that on the box use the ruler to do the same for all the dowels that you are using and make the same marks on the other side of the box.

Using a sharp scissors make some holes where the dowels are going to go through. Once they are in place use a hot glue gun to put some glue around the ends to stop them from coming out; remember you will need to do different sides for the different teams.

Finally I used some coloured tape to put around the handles for each team so that they knew which ones to hold. It should alternate (on each side) between a coloured end and an end with glue on.

Now you are ready to let them start playing.

EC and YC loved this game, they actually choose to keep playing it over having bedtime stories the other night! It now lives under EC’s bed and he loves to pull it out and have play with his sister.

Make sure you follow our homemade games board on Pinterest for more ideas.

Pin for later: