I grew up playing Loteria. I hadn’t thought it about until I had kids and I bought the game out again to play it with them. The boys love it! It’s a super easy game to play. It’s pretty much bingo but instead of numbers, you have photos instead. It’s a Mexican game known as a game of chance aka Mexican bingo. So, there are cards like The Musician/ El Musico or The Frog/ La Rana. Everything is in Spanish which is helpful if you are trying to raise bilingual kids. Last year I surprised my family members with our own custom set! Everyone loved it!!! The boys love a good family game night so our new custom DIY Loteria board game comes out quite frequently!

DIY LOTERIA BOARD GAME

Interested in making your own set? It’s easy! Here is what you need to do!

Step 1: Find 54 photos you want to use! I put them in an album in my phone which made it really easy to keep me organized. I would scroll through all of my old photos and then add them to the album when I found ones that were special memories that everyone would know. I also had to think about names for the cards. Since it was a family set I couldn’t just keep putting Hudson as the name of a photo. I had to get creative. If it was a photo of Hudson showing off a lego creation he made it became The Builder to go in line with the traditional Loteria names. I even added some Spangish in there along with plain old Spanish. You can do whatever you like!

Step 2: Customize your photos. You can leave your photos as-is, but I thought with different photo backgrounds it would get really busy. I decided to use an app called Photo Lab instead and I paid $4.99 for one month. I added all of my photos into it and picked a filter from the pop art and cartoon section to get the look of my cards. It removed the busy background and silhouetted the people in the photos.

Step 3: Make a Canva account and use my template to make your board cards! Each board has 16 photos and you need to make sure to mix up all of the photos throughout the 10 board cards. In canva you will add the text to the photos. Cards will print out at 6″ x 8″.

Step 4: Then you need to use those photos for playing cards. This is what you will need 54 cards of. I made them larger and put them on their own template. This will be printed out as sheets and then cut into the cards that are around 2 1/4″ x 3 1/4″.

PRINTING NOTE: I do all of my printing through the UPS store. They are awesome! I always email them my projects and they help me out with figuring out sizing, paper weight, and the best price. For this project, the board cards came up to .30 and the playing cards came up to .25 cents. Each packet was 10 boards and 54 playing cards. I originally thought I would need to cut it all to size, but the UPS handled the cutting down. Each set was around $18. I printed enough for the different households in my family.

It is the perfect gift and can totally be done last minute! I looked back at my emails with the UPS store and I was doing printing on the 23rd and 24th of December! I added pom poms to be used as the counting markers. We play until your whole board is full so, it can last a bit of time and you get through the majority of the cards. If you don’t want to make your own set, but still want to play then you can pick up an authentic Loteria board card game for less than $10 or an updated Millennial set for $23.

Happy Playing!