Ever lamented how your favorite childhood board games seem smaller now that you’re bigger? No? Well then here’s a solution you definitely didn’t ask for: board games blown up to life size!
In order of spectacle, here are 10 classics…
10. Connect Four
Perhaps because it’s so basic, Connect Four attracts a lot of record-setting types—like Josh Graber, who dropped a counter into the board from 31 ½ inches above, or Constantine Markides, who held 76 counters in one hand, or Emily Wilson, who got seven counters spinning at once. In 2009, at The Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, the record was set for the largest-ever game board. The centerpiece of a Connect Four tournament, it measured 45 ¼ inches wide by 32 ¼ inches high. The counters themselves each had a diameter of 5 ¼ inches, which is about the size of a teacup saucer.
If that all sounds disappointingly small, maybe the real-life “Connect Four” is for you. Sam Denby’s Jet Lag: The Game, which he made for YouTube, replaces the counters with people and the board with the western seaboard of the United States. A hybrid of Connect Four and The Amazing Race, it involves two teams traveling across states and completing challenges in the capitals to claim them. The first to claim four in a row—on a budget of $5,000—wins.
9. The Royal Game of Ur
One of the most ancient board games, and certainly the oldest on this list, the Royal Game of Ur dates back to roughly 2600-2400 BC. So it’s one you golden oldies might recall. It was first discovered in the Royal Tombs of the Sumerian city-state Ur—one of the first-ever cities in the world, inhabited for thousands of years. Today it gives us a fascinating glimpse of how our ancestors liked to pass time.
The game board features twenty squares grouped into three separate areas. Each square also has a pattern that may have been pertinent to the game; we’re still not really sure how to play it (although we do have AI on the case). What we do know is that it was designed for two players, each playing with black or white pieces, and involved turn-based racing according to the roll of tetrahedral dice. It appears to have combined both luck and strategy.
Whatever the case, the British Museum commissioned a giant version of the game for an exhibit coinciding with the launch of its website mesopotamia.co.uk. Visitors could interpret the game board, which was big enough for people to stand inside the squares, however, they liked—and it came complete with the authentic patterns and tetrahedral dice.
8. Monopoly
Life-sized Monopoly has always been around; it’s the privilege of oligarchs and kleptocrats. But now there’s a version for plebs. The best-selling board game—devised in 1903 to show the cruel absurdity of monopolizing land (before the game became an ironic runaway commercial success)—is now an expensive (60 pence per minute per person) tourist “experience” in London.
Monopoly Lifesized, in the crowded West End, is played on an officially licensed, 15-by-15-meter, gameshow-style board. It’s not the same as the tabletop game but the basic rules still apply: Players have to get their piece (the giant Scottie Dog, Racing Car, or whatever) around the board, completing tasks to gain wealth at the expense of their friends. In this case, however, activities include puzzles and physical challenges in rooms representing each property.
First, though, players choose a theme—calling to mind the endless stream of themed editions currently swamping the market. Here, the options are limited: Classic, Luxury, or City. In Classic, it’s a trip down (your great grandparents’) memory lane. Activities include solving crosswords on Fleet Street (the old newspaper capital of the world) or cracking codes in Whitehall (where MI6 used to be). In the Luxury version, players get to sycophantically simulate the lifestyles of those aforementioned oligarchs (by “winning big at the casinos of Coventry Street,” for example, or “bidding for art … on Bond Street”). The City theme, meanwhile, based on modern-day bog standard London, lets players pretend to do all the things they could be doing if they weren’t playing this—like shopping on Regent Street, catching a musical on Tottenham Court Road, or gazing at the night-time skyline.
7. Trivial Pursuit
In August 2014, to commemorate the outbreak of World War One, the city of Liège, Belgium, unveiled a giant Trivial Pursuit board in its central plaza. Covering an impressive 400 square meters, it was themed for the Great War era.
The game was played by members of the public using a giant die to move their counters around the board, collecting giant colored pieces of plastic pie/cake for answering questions correctly. Naturally, these were asked via microphone. There were also assistants dressed in fittingly formal Victorian-style morning suits.
Despite the numerous editions it’s spawned, Trivial Pursuit is actually pretty young for a board game; it came out in 1979. In addition to the event in Liège, though, there have also been TV game show versions, starting with the BBC’s in 1990.
6. Operation
Here’s one that actually makes sense. In 2023, engineering students from Washington State University created a life-sized version of the board game Operation—the game of human surgery—this time with realistic-looking organs and bones made from silicone.
The project was an education in itself, involving computer-aided design, 3D printing, and safety considerations for the user, but it was also an education to others. Currently housed at the Palouse Discovery Science Center’s EveryBODY exhibit, the life-sized Operation game challenges players to perform “surgery” on a human-sized body, using tongs to extract body parts from cavities without touching the sides and triggering the buzzer. Just like the original.
5. Ouija
In October 2019, the famously witchy town of Salem, Massachusetts unveiled the world’s largest Ouija board—affectionately named Ouijazilla. Created by Rick “Ormortis” Schreck, vice president of the Talking Board Historical Society, it covered 3,168 square feet, dwarfing all previous record holders in the giant Ouija board category—which, believe it or not, is a thing.
Weighing in at 9,000 pounds, this colossal wooden replica, longer than a brontosaurus, was big enough to park five full-size 18-wheel trucks. The planchette alone, the movable piece used to spell out messages, weighed 400 pounds and was 15 feet long, big enough for Schreck to stand in for a photo—all of which makes Ouijazilla ideal for contacting enormous or far away ghosts. The whole thing took more than a year to complete, with assembly and painting all hand-done by Schreck and his family, aka “the Haus of Schreck.” Although he didn’t keep track, he reckons they used about 20 quarts (19 liters) of black enamel paint; but he has no idea how many gallons of deck stain.
The design he based it on was Hasbro’s iconic 1998 version, which, he says, he could fit 2,300 copies of on Ouijazilla. The original Ouija board came out just over a century before Hasbro’s, apparently to capitalize on the popularity of spiritualism in 19th-century America. But from the very beginning, it was marketed as a board game or toy. One of the earliest ads, in 1891 from a Pittsburgh toy shop, dubbed it “Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board.” Since then, as each generation of users has departed for the spirit world itself, Ouija has become a cult obsession. Schreck calls himself a “Ouija maniac.” He not only collects the boards, he’s also made other versions of his own, in some cases out of embalming tables and church pews.
4. Jenga
In 2019, Caterpillar (CAT), the construction equipment manufacturer, set the Guinness World Record for the largest game of Jenga ever played. They only used half as many blocks as the tabletop version (27 instead of 54), but each of these laminated pine beams (8 feet in length, 2 feet 8 inches in width, and 1 foot 4 inches in height) weighed 600 pounds for a total of 8.1 tons. That’s about the weight of a T-rex or school bus.
The game itself was played by five CAT machines—including a 320E excavator and a 277D multi-terrain loader—and supervised from the ground by a tiny, imperiled-looking foreman. This was Chad Cremeens, CAT’s field operations manager, who came up with the project to show off the vehicles.
Naturally, the stunt was carefully planned to keep everyone safe and the machines looking good (it was after all for PR). Hence they didn’t let the tower fall over; they stopped after 28 hours, having stacked 13 layers to a height of 20 feet.
3. Moustrap
If you’ve ever played Mousetrap, you’ve probably imagined it life-sized. If you haven’t played it, here’s a primer: to complete the game, players gradually construct a cartoonish Rube Goldberg machine, an unwieldy yet effective contraption based on chain reaction—in this case to drop a cage over one or all of your opponent mice. The life-sized version is surprisingly faithful and something of a traveling sideshow, roaming from fair to fair across the US with its creator Mark Perez.
Perez was obsessed with the game as a child, buying multiple sets to combine the pieces for a Mousetrap to end all Mousetraps. And he memorized the blueprints into adulthood. Where the Life Size Game of Mousetrap differs from the original (aside from the fact that it weighs 25 tons) is in the piece-by-piece construction by players. Given the scale of the thing, there’s no participation there. But it is interactive; spectators can set the thing running. Ostensibly the purpose is to see “real-world” Newtonian physics and applied scientific principles in an era of digital shut-ins. To that end, Perez and his team have shown it off at science centers, museums, and festivals such as the traveling Maker Faire.
2. Scrabble
In 1998, to celebrate Scrabble’s 50th anniversary, London’s Wembley Stadium was transformed from a venue for football into the setting for the world’s largest Scrabble game. All the top Scrabble players were invited to play, gathering on the field to lay tiles the size of dinner tables. Of course, these being frail, thinking types—and this being Britain—they called in the army for the grunt work, with paratroopers placing the tiles wherever players directed them.
This strange event was an odd combination of intellectual prowess and sheer brute force. Given the size of the field-turned-board, it was also a test of logistics.
1. Chess
Life-size chess is a little overdone, but what about human chess? Every two years, the Italian town of Marostica hosts a human chess game for its biennial festival. For the spectacular occasion, the town’s main square is transformed into a living chessboard surrounded by over 600 participants dressed in medieval costumes—including knights, fire-breathers, and flag-wavers. The tradition began more than 100 years ago in 1923, but its origins date back much earlier. In 1454, so the legend goes, two young knights—Rinaldo D’Angarano and Vieri da Vallonara—were rivals for the hand of Lionora, the daughter of the local lord. To settle the dispute, instead of a duel her father decreed they play chess. The winner would marry Lionora, while the loser would marry her sister, Oldrada. Each of these characters is re-enacted at the festival, watching over the human chess game itself.
It’s not played in real-time, but that’s part of the appeal; each move is carefully choreographed for the costumed black and white chess pieces as a riveting show for spectators.
In 1924, however, a human chess game was played for real. “Live Chess,” as it was called, saw two Russian chess masters—Peter Romanovsky and Ilya Rabinovich—play on a huge board painted directly onto the cobbles of Palace Square, Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg). Each square was big enough for about twenty men, but only contained one man (for a pawn), or one on horseback (for a knight), or three men and a cannon (for the rook), and so on. The black human “pieces” were borrowed from the Red Army, while the whites were from the Navy. The players communicated moves via telephone and the game lasted an arduous five hours, watched by an audience of 8,000—making it an inscrutable example of entertainment before the age of TV.