I’ve mentioned in a previous post about how it’s important to teach your children some of your hobbies, and even more important is to actually spend time with your children. One of my hobbies is playing video games, and there’s no better game to teach your child than Mario Kart. With my kids also being obsessed with matchbox cars right now, it’s a great time of bonding where my oldest will press the accelerator button while my wife or I will steer.

While we do enjoy this time playing with them, there is something to say about limiting your time with electronics, so we made up a little game called Mario Kart Unplugged. The rules are simple, and have the side benefits of reinforcing counting, sharing my family’s love of board games, and teaching good sportsmanship.

How to play

What you’ll need

• Small matchbox cars
• 30 brown lunch bags / pieces of paper
• A die
• Dice tower (optional)
• Music (optional)

Setup

In Mario Kart Unplugged, you choose a matchbox car and declare them as your racer. Make this fun, and try to give your racer a cool name (or you can just use the actual Mario names). The goal will be for you to get your racer around the track before any of the other racers do.

Next, you start building the track. You are welcome to use actual Hot Wheel tracks, but you’ll need to be able to count the distance you travel in one die roll (1-6 die). When initially digging through craft supplies, I found lots of extra brown lunch bags, but you could just use pieces of paper as well. In this game each lunch bag or piece of paper marks one section down the track. We usually put out about thirty or so sections, and try to have it curve, or go around/under furniture.

Once your track is created, line up all of your racers at the beginning of the track and get ready to race! For extra fun, you can look up and play the Mario Kart music on speakers, or choose similar racing music (Cars soundtrack, etc.).

Playing

Finally, we get to actually playing. Determine an order for rolling the dice. You can either roll the die and determine order by that, or simply have your kids go first and then you go last. Once the turn order is decided, everyone takes turns rolling the dice and moving their racer forward that many sections. Be sure you let your children roll on their turn and make them count the amount of dots of the die that they roll, and then move their car the appropriate amount.

This reinforces counting, gets their body moving, and teaches them reading dice, which will help them as we continue to teach them board games in the future.

Keep taking turns until one of the first racer crosses the finish line. Encourage everyone to cheer when someone crosses the finish line and to say “Good race”, or something similar.

Advanced play

My kids are still young, so this is enough for them to keep track of, but you better believe I’ve thought of some ways to make it more fun for older children.

• Add item boxes throughout the course, where you draw a random item once you hit a specific section on the track. You can either roll to see what item you get, or draw it out of a hat (allows you to better change the odds of what gets pulled). I’ve thought of a few examples of how the items can impact the game below.
  
  1. Mushroom – Add +2 to your next die roll
  2. Red Shell – The player ahead of you loses their next turn
  3. Blue Shell – The play in first loses their next turn
  4. Squid – All players get -1 to their next die roll
  5. Super horn – All players within 2 spaces lose their next turn
  6. Star – Add +3 to your next die roll and you are invincible from other player’s items until your next turn
     
• Think about adding some forks in the road with different benefits. For example, going down the left path is 2 spaces longer, but I will get an item box.

Final thoughts

While I do believe this game is fun enough to keep younger children interested, one of the most important parts is your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is contagious, and if you have fun and make it a big deal, they will too. Happy racing!

Reflection Questions

1. Does your family have any “special games” that you play together? If so, when was the last time you did that?
   
2. Spend a half hour thinking of a quick game that gets the entire family together, but also includes something that your children are excited about.
   
3. How am I teaching my children that losing is okay? Being sad/mad is okay, but how can we show good sportsmanship through that?