Blank Space: The Game you 100% Make Up

One summer day I realized I had a blank poster board lying around with nothing on it. To remedy this, I grabbed some coloring utensils, cereal boxes, scissors, glue, and dice, and asked my sister and Mom to gather at the dining room table.

My family has played a dozen different games together plenty of times, but never before had we made one from scratch.

The idea of the game I call “Blank Space” is simple. You start with a blank space that’s able to be defaced (normally a large sheet of cardboard or a posterboard) and you make a game on it. Of course this only works in a cooperative and fun-spirited manner, as winning is a bit of a myth. Rather, the fun is garnered from the joint creative process of making the game as opposed to actually playing it.

The poster board “Blank Space”s I’ve contributed to were both candy-land-esque games. Meaning they had a large, snaking line of squares through various decorated areas, and the squares sometimes had challenges on them. Some squares from the game with my Mom included “compliment the person in front of you” and “draw a smiley-face somewhere on the game board” when you landed on them. If you got to the end of the line of squares, you just added more squares with a marker.
It can grow infinitely. You could bring in more sheets of paper. You could bring in a box and build stairs up to it. You could develop a castle and play “protect the princess” in a tower you built. The possibilities are limited only by your collaborative imagination.

This was the result of the second-ever “Blank Space” poster board game two friends and I made.

I tried this idea with a dryer box too and called it “Blank Space World”. I set it up in my room and added a gridded map to it. We even came up with a six-page rules/instructions book, made health-bar bases for some figurines of mine to be used as game pieces, made cards for each of the figurines with different attacks and an energy system, added terrain blocks to differentiate rounds… the list goes on. It was a nicely developed game.
Did we play it? Nope. Was it fun to create it? Incredibly.

This was how far the board of “Blank Space World” got before I evicted the dryer box.

The game “Blank Space” is a concept that, if solidified into one set of rules would ruin its charm. A game can last minutes to hours to days to weeks to I don’t know… years. There’s no way to monetize it. The Dollar Tree already sells most everything you could need for it. The hardest part (I’d say) is getting people creative and crazy enough to play it with you.