We aren’t competitive people. In fact, every fiber of our beings cries out for cooperation (we can hear them crying even now). Seriously, if at all possible, we prefer working together — the greatest win of all. Win and win. No losers! That said, we understand and appreciate the satisfaction of personal achievement. In fact, we play lots of games together. It’s just that we don’t keep score — at least not in the competitive sense. We only pay attention to our own highest scores and only with the intention of surpassing our personal best. Thus, game playing for us is always joyful.
Our favorite games are the games we make 
ourselves. We’ve found that if we come up with an idea or game we’d like to play and ride the coattails of serendipity, we often get a Yahtzee, and sometimes literally. For example, at the beginning of 2013, we began devising a plan to repurpose everything we possibly could. The idea was to try to imagine a use for something before throwing it in the recycle bin or landfill.
While it may seem a bit odd, we’ve figured out a plethora of uses for the humble toilet paper tube. Our first such discovery was that we could use them to secure things like gift wrapping paper and extension cords. But, as with most things, over time, practice makes perfect — we honed our toilet paper tube skills.
Between our joy of making our own games and our drive to repurpose, we stumbled onto to an idea that resulted in our most used and most beloved game set yet. Yahtzee!
Here’s how we did it:
First off, we already had the dice, and we downloaded copies of the scorecard from the Internet. Click here to download. The game rules are available from Hasbro. Click here for the rules. We easily gathered the additional necessary supplies:
4 T.P. tubes
1 misc. cardboard box (product placement alert!)
1 scrap piece of wrapping paper (for the backs of the scorecards) 1 scrap piece of wrapping paper (to cover the tubes)
2 self-laminating sheets (or clear contact paper)
packing tape
tacky glue
jute string
4 dry erase pens
scissors
To make the roll cups:
From the Triscuit cardboard, we carefully cut bottom disks to fit tightly in the tubes. We covered each cut disk with a piece of matching wrapping paper and glued the paper onto the disk.
Because we didn’t have quite enough paper to cover the tubes, we attached strips of alternate edging to the tops and bottoms of each sheet. We wrapped each tube with the paper and delicately rolled and tucked the bottom part of the sheet under the bottom of each tube. This created a little ledge to catch the disk. We eased the disk down into the tube until it came to rest on the bottom edge of the rolled under-paper.
We glued a bit of jute around the bottom disk to secure it in place, and give it added strength. After the glued jute completely dried, we used the packing tape to wrap the outside of each tube. This will keep the roll cup somewhat moisture proof and make it more durable.
To make the scorecards:
We printed out 4 scorecards (download link above). We cut 4 pieces of wrapping paper about 1/4″ larger than our scorecards on each side. We placed the scorecards and wrapping paper back-to-back and secured them with a couple dots of glue. We then cut them evenly to match and covered them with laminating sheets. The beauty of this is that by using dry erase pens, the same four scorecards can be used over and over again. To us, this feature makes this idea a real Yahtzee score!
THAT’S IT!!! DONE! This is quite possibly the easiest and least expensive game we’ve ever made. It is well used and holding up just fine. In fact, it may just be a slightly magical Yahtze
e set. Since we’ve started playing with it, each of us has rolled three Yahtzees in one game. We know, Yahtzee nerds. Oh well.
We hope we have inspired you to make your life more exhilarating through the magic of repurposing.
In Kindness,
~JnK