How was your Christmas break house nerds? Mine was pretty relaxed, involved lots of fresh seafood, pavlova, getting angry at Mr House Nerd for eating all the gingerbread, and watching so many episodes of The Walking Dead I had zombie nightmares. Pretty standard.
Today I thought I would share a Christmas present I had a bit of fun preparing. I have two younger sisters, both in their 20s, and one of them loves having board game nights with her friends. I made her personalised DIY Guess Who using pictures of our family and people we know.
I know, I know, before you go saying how clever I am, I have to admit that I can’t take credit for the idea! I saw it on the amazing tool that is Pinterest via this post. I love Pinterest! It’s one of my favourite sources of creative and crafty inspiration and is an awesome way to get motivated and get ideas (I also like to sit there slumped over my computer and slack-jawed, just endlessly clicking on pretty pictures). You can check out the House Nerd Pinterest page here.
My sister opened the game and LOVED it immediately and I felt the triumph known as present success! We played several rounds after Christmas lunch. Questions were not so much the standard Guess Who questions like, “Does your person have a beard?” but rather “Is your person drunk?” to “Does your person have their mouth open?” to “Is your person extremely happy?” and “Is your person a darkie?” (from my Sri Lankan father, who is, erm, a darkie).
The link on Pinterest didn't work properly, but it wasn't too hard to figure out how to make it at home. But here are my terrible instructions anyway.
DO IT YOURSELF - PERSONALISED GUESS WHO USING PEOPLE YOU KNOW
First I ordered a vintage set of Guess Who off eBay. I wanted the old-school 80s version rather than the modern one but you can use whichever.
Then I went on Facebook, the greatest tool for all stalkers, and took screenshots of our family and friends. Alternatively you can download them these days *creepy stalker smile* Lots of drunk photos on Facebook. Guess Who gold, my friends. I even used this one of our dog looking suspiciously drunk.
I am crap at using Photoshop, so I copied and pasted the screenshots one by one into Paint and cropped them into portrait shapes. (My graphic designer, Photoshop-whiz best friend will probably kill me for the way I did and am now explaining this, but I will go on. I am a soldier like that).
Now if you have a colour printer you can easily just print off your portraits at home. But because I didn’t have a colour printer, instead I copied and pasted each portrait into a Microsoft word document and copied them three times, so each person had a row of three little identical images. I kept doing this until I had covered all 24 people.
I then did a screenshot of every two players, copied and pasted them into Paint and saved them as JPEGs. So by the end I had 12 files - each with three little pictures of two players.
I got each photo printed at the photo centre in three different sizes – standard, one size larger, and wallet-size. I figured as long as I had three sizes I would pretty much cover my bases and not have to worry if some of the faces were too small or too big. It worked out perfectly. All up the photo printing came to less than $10.
Then I cut each player’s photo to fit the little flaps and stuck them in – it was very easy to do. If some of the photos didn’t fit quite snugly I just added a bit of stickytape to the back. I stuck a name sticker using white sticky labels onto each person. Do the same things for the cards.
With the cover I pasted cut-out card letters over the top of the lettering to change it to Guess You, did some dodgy-looking white out around the letters, and then used leftover photos to decorate the box to personalise it.
I changed the speech boxes coming out of the little boy’s mouth so that he was saying, “Has your person got brown hair?” “Yes.” “Is your person annoying?” “Yes.” “I know! It’s SIMONE.”
For fun I added Chuck Norris onto the cover as one of the players. But he’s not in the actual game. Because you don’t guess Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris guesses you.
Mr House Nerd said he didn’t get it. I’m not quite sure I get it either even though I wrote it.
Hope you have an awesome New Year’s Eve house nerds. If you have had any "present successes" this Christmas or in previous years I'd love to hear about them.