The McCaul family enjoying their home made snakes and ladders game!

Family's 15x15 foot masterpiece with 100 hand painted squares and giant dice

A Kingscourt family has gotten creative in their bid to stay fit and entertained during lockdown by creating a giant life sized snakes and ladders board game in their back garden!

The process had its ups and downs according to mum of four Maureen McCaul who spent five hours drawing the incredible 15x15 foot masterpiece complete with 100 squares, hand painted snakes and ladder details and giant dice made from cardboard boxes.

Athboy native Maureen explains how the genius idea came together:

“With everything that’s going on, we stocked up on board games but with the weather being so good I didn’t want the kids inside and we have three dogs so if we brought the board games out the dogs would eat the bits.

“So I came with this plan of making a board game outside.

The masterpiece took Kingcourt mum Maureen five hours to make!

“We got the back concreted last year so we just had a big blank canvas.

“The workers left some screed behind because it is still not finished.

“It is metal and has perfect straight lines so my intention was to draw it out in chalk first but with three dogs lying on it I was rubbing out lines as fast as I was drawing them on.

“I did the outline in chalk first and then I gathered up the troops and got ceiling paint from the garage, mixed it up with whatever colours we had and we started filling it in.

“You had to draw out the squares, paint every second one of them in and then number them one to one hundred and then draw the snakes and the ladders.

The Dice was made from cardboard boxes

“I got two empty cardboard boxes in a supermarket and we made two giant dice to go with it.

“There was a lot of hours and hard work put in to paint it but it was well worth it.

“It was like I had done 20,000 squats I couldn’t walk for three days!”

Maureen says the activity has been a ‘godsend’ in keeping kids Sarah, 22, Patrick, 20, Conor, 16, Mairead 12 and Aileen 4 occupied in lockdown.

“It is really hard to get an activity that suits a big age range like my kids but it has gotten more use than any other board game that I bought.

“They have now started making a giant connect four game. They have 21 red paper plates painted and 21 yellow paper plates painted because you need 42 squares for that so that’s the next project.”

Hours of family fun created by a life sized snakes and ladders game

Speaking of iconic board games, I discovered that it's often a case of ‘Guess Who’ for Maureen, who did not know until she was sixteen that her real name was in fact Helen!

“My parents named me Helen but my brother started calling me Maureen so they just stuck with the nickname.

“My full name is Helen Heidi Marie Sorcha and I landed with Maureen!

“The day I was christened my brother liked this name and started calling me it and it just stuck.

“Everybody was calling me Maureen even at school.

“I was shocked when I found out but I didn’t like the name Helen and all I could think about was Nelly Olsen out of Little House on the Prairie so I was glad of Maureen!

“When we sent out our wedding invitations because we had to go official people were wondering who was Padraig marrying because no one knew my name was Helen but unfortunately he still landed up the aisle with me!”