Ideas to Print Your Board

The board in Romanceopoly is a crucial part of the whole experience.  Whether you are following the Direct or Scenic route, you’ll still want to somehow keep track of where you are on the board.  You can get creative with this!  I’m going to include some options for you to do this. Firstly, get this all down on paper by printing the board and I different ideas on how to do this. Secondly, you can keep track of the challenge digitally!

PRINTING

Don’t you think it’s more fun when you have something in your hands?  You can touch it, write on it… I know I can’t be alone in loving this!  In my opinion, printing the Romanceopoly board is an important part of the process.  We’ve created some printables you can utilise in any way you chose. However, I wanted to give you some ideas on how you can use them.

The easiest way to do this is to print your board on a piece of regular size paper. This will usually be either Letter or A4  depending on your country.  Keep in mind that the printables are sized for Letter size, but if you are using A4 paper you can use the ‘fit to size’ option and it will print out as intended.  Once the board is printed you can keep your Romanceopoly docs all together in a folder or a clipboard.

But don’t forget to play with your printer settings!  If you want to include the board in your planners you can definitely do that by playing with the percentage it prints to.  The file is ready for Letter size, which should work okay if you have an A5 planner or Bullet Journal. But, you can certainly resize the board if you have a Personal size planner by playing with the percentage on the printer settings screen.

There is also a different style printable sized for your Half Letter (close to A5) planners.  It’s designed to print double sided to include in your ring or ARC bound planners but you could certainly print it single sided and paste into your BUJO as well.  That one is marked as the Half Letter tracker board.

And why not have one board for “playing” using the colourful board and have one board for tracking your progress (the “tracker” board)?  Remember at the end of the challenge we will be giving away a prize to the best board so don’t be scared to get creative with it.  Colour it, put stickers on it, highlight, write on it… Whatever you choose to do!

We’ve also created an 18 x 18 size board and that’s available to download in two formats.  There is the DIY board, which is broken down into 4 pages that you print on Letter size paper.  Once you’ve printed your DIY board, trim the excess white space and you can use a glue stick or tape roller to put on a blank game board (as above)! The other option is the full sized board on one unbroken sheet that you can get printed on to a foam board. The best way to do this is through a professional printers like Staples, but be sure to get a price quote from the professional printer service you want to use before sending it off, prices can vary.

Another fun printable we designed are the Idea Cards!  You can simply print these pages and write in your ideas for books that fit the challenges.  There’s a star next to each line so you can colour in the one you do read.  Or you can highlight that book title from the list…you can mark them off in any way think of! The cards have been designed so you can use them in a couple of ways. You can print them on regular Letter size paper and keep it with your “board” on your challenge clipboard. Or you can also print this on a thicker cardstock and cut the cards out to make them actual cards for the game.  The printable is designed to fit Avery Business Cards if you want to avoid any cutting!

DIGITAL

As much as I love all my paper products, keeping up with tracking on my computer or an App is the easiest for me on a day to day basis.  Then afterwards I can go in and colour in a tracking board.  The sheer practicality of a digital system is necessary for me.  So if you’re the same, I’ve created a sample database you can use to track your challenge!  You can add your ideas, the books you’ve read and much more.  I used Airtable to create this sample and to use it for yourself you’ll have to have an Airtable account.  This is a free account!  You don’t need to worry about upgrading to paid versions; you won’t need any of the paid features for this sample database to work.  If you are ready to get the database, click the link below!

CLICK HERE FOR SAMPLE DATABASE

Just be sure to use the COPY BASE button located on the top right corner of the sample database. This will can import the sample into your own account after that you can start editing and make changes.  The sample provided on this link is set as a read only to make sure nothing gets corrupted in the process.

The best part about using Airtable is that you can also download their free app and use directly from your phone!  Works like a charm for writing in quick ideas when a a moment of inspiration strikes but you don’t have anywhere to write them down.

If you have any questions about using Airtable, leave them in the comments and I’ll try and answer them!

Another option for tracking what you’ve read is using Goodreads. It isn’t quite as flexible as using the Airtable, but it has the advantage of showing you all the details of the book when you decide if it fits the challenge parameters. I plan on creating a “romanceopoly” shelf and then adding the books I plan to read to that shelf with a note about which challenge they are for. When I get time to decorate my board I will then refer back to my romanceopoly shelf to see what challenges I have completed.

Have you thought of a fun and new idea for how you’ll be “playing” Romance-opoly?  Share with us in the comments below!