La Loteria Magallon

So way back sometime in December, I think I mentioned that I was making a special crafty present for my parents and said that I would post pictures soon and well, that never happened. I am sure you all lost sleep over that, but in order to feel complete, I want to go ahead and share what I did.

For those unfamiliar with La Loteria, it is a table top game that is very popular in Mexico and has seeped into the pop culture. You might even recognize the iconic image of El Diablito. It is much like Bingo in that each player has at least one card called a tabla with four rows and four columns, but instead of numbers, you have pictures. These are called out from a deck and just like Bingo, the rules are set beforehand–do you need to match the whole card or just a line, an X or whatever?

So I had this idea floating in my head for the better part of a year, a Loteria where I replaced all the pictures with ones from my family. It was kinda daunting but when I finally sat down to do it, it wasn’t that bad. Actually, it was kinda funny, instead of a 4×4 tabla, I mistakenly made 5×5 tablas which made it extra work for me (and will make for longer games) but by the time I noticed it, it was too late.

Let me just say, it came out awesomely.

I designed the playing cards that get called out by the cantor first. I decided I would get them printed professionally by Moo which meant I had a total of 50 cards to work with. I needed to find photos, crop, frame, and label them. I also designed a back. With all that in place, I uploaded everything to Moo and they took care of it. I got an adorable and sturdy black box with all my cards printed beautifully, one side with the game card, the other with the “logo” I created for the game.

Once I ordered those, I was able to focus on making the tablas. Oh boy, was that ever a treat! I had this huge PS file with no less than 50 layers so that I could swap out the pictures on the grid to make 10 unique playing cards. After that little bit of a nightmare, I printed them out on photo paper. I also printed the backs, trimmed, and then they went into my Xyron machine for lamination.

Cards? On their way. Tablas? Done. Now I needed a box to keep it in and possibly tokens to mark what’s been called on your tabla. I kinda hit the jackpot one day at work when someone put scrap foam core posterboard in the break room. I was able to make a box from that and then cover it in scrap paper and modge podge it to make it withstand grimy hands. Then I went to Michael’s on another errand and found a little round cardboard box that I could use to keep the tokens in. Bought that, covered it in the same paper as the big box and filled it with pretty buttons.

I was done!!

Below are the files that I used for the card backs and a few sample cards. If you want to see more images, check out this collection.

I hope you liked it! My family loved it although we have yet to sit down and play it. On Christmas night we all went through the cards as a family and saw the photos I chose and the labels I created for them.

Edited to even out the number of cards at the end, it was bugging me.