A traditional Swedish game for all the family

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been reading as many Swedish picture books as we could get hold of. Sitting and reading is LOTS of fun, of course, but sometimes getting up, throwing things and bringing out a little bit of the competitive spirit can also be very enjoyable – and thus the Swedish game called Kubb has been something we’ve also been getting up to.

From these full instructions you’ll see that traditionally it’s an outdoor game with wooden pieces, where there are two teams and the aim is to knock down all the pieces on the opposite half of the field from your team, and then finally to knock down the “king”, a large central piece. Here’s a video clip to get a better idea:

As it’s the middle of winter here we opted to amend the game to suit smaller people playing indoors. We made the set of pieces out of card and used a bedsheet to define the field boundaries.

This game was a HUGE hit! What kid doesn’t enjoy being encourage to throw things indoors, usually such a forbidden activity?!

A physical game that encourages developing an accurate throw, this made a great change to playing a board game round the table.

In fact we enjoyed the game so much that I think we’ll make a wooden set to play in the garden in the summer – a couple of fence post and broom handles sawn into short lengths should suffice (and I think M could even handle doing a little bit of the sawing of the broom handles). If you don’t have a saw you can buy Kubb sets online.

Alongside playing Kubb and reading Pancakes for Findus and When Findus was Little and Disappeared we’ve been listening to:

Instead of (or as well as) playing Kubb you could try out these activities if you wanted a Swedish activity to go with the books we’ve been reading:

And now over to you: Have you ever been to Sweden? What’s your favourite physical game for all the family?