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donald.seagraves@gmail.com

Welcome to the Game-It-Yourself website! Here you will find tips on making your own games, links to websites that offer free games, and tips and tricks that could come in handy if you want to make homemade games.

But why make your own games? Why not just buy games like everyone else? Well, for one, games you make yourself can often (but not always) be cheaper than games you'd buy at the store or online. Also, many game designers have released some of their games to the public for free -- some of these designers are well-known, while some are just regular folks who had great ideas for games that they wanted to share with the public. Furthermore, making games from scratch can be a very rewarding hobby whose fruits can be shared with others. Besides, why not?

The Internet has become a treasure trove of great free games, many of which are available in easy-to-print formats such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word -- in most cases all you need to get started is some card stock and a color printer. Also, many of the games you can find online are easy to piece together using common gaming bits that can be readily found in most households, such as colored pawns, dice, playing cards, Monopoly money, etc.

For the most part, you won't find many Chess variants or games that can be played solely with a deck of cards -- I've decided not to cover this area, since it is well covered already by two excellent websites. If you are interested in Chess variants, I suggest you visit ChessVariants.com -- they have just about every Chess variant known to man. If games that can be played with a deck of cards spark your interest, I suggest visiting Pagat.com -- they have just about every game that can be played with a regular deck of cards plus many more games that can be played with regional and foreign decks.

I hope you'll find the contents of this website useful, and I'm looking forward to adding more and more content as the days and weeks go by. For now, the main atraction is the The Game-it-Yourself Canonical List of Free Print-and-Play Games -- far from complete, but still filled with links and information on plenty of free print-and-play games. Also, if you are confused by any of the terms you see on this website, you can consult the glossary that I've prepared. Enjoy!