Celebrate your geeky side and bring Star Wars Land to your own backyard this summer by building your own custom Star Wars DIY cornhole boards featuring our favorite droids, BB-8 and R2-D2.
We love outdoor summer activities and we LOVE Disney, so we are stoked to combine the two in today’s tutorial! In case you hadn’t heard, Star Wars Land (officially Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge) opened this weekend at Disneyland. We will definitely be going on our next Disney trip, but for now, I consoled myself and celebrated in my own way by building a set of DIY cornhole boards, painted as R2-D2 and BB-8.
The build is perfect for a beginner, and you paint the cornhole platform however you’d like. Customize your boards with your favorite sports team, cartoon character, or anything you can think of! Check out the video tutorial for building and custom painting the cornhole boards below and grab the printable building plan here in the shop.
Did you love seeing our girls literally grow up right before your eyes in that video?! Be sure to subscribe to our channel to see more of their cute faces and more projects!
If you’ve never played cornhole before, it’s sure to become a favorite yard game! This backyard beanbag toss game (sometimes also called corn toss or soft horseshoes) is fun for all ages and easy to customize the throwing distance for older or younger players. Stand back and toss the beanbag into the hole in the center of the board — or try a pro technique and slide it across the board to drop it in the hole! (Read below for an overview of the official cornhole rules.)
Related Reading: 25 DIY Yard Games
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DIY Star Wars Cornhole Boards
These DIY cornhole boards are easy to build and cornhole is a great outdoor game to play with family or with a group at a summer BBQ. The folding legs make for easy storage, and a custom painted board easily doubles as decor for your patio — just hang the boards on the wall when you’re finished playing. Ours are going to look great on our covered patio that we painted and decorated last summer.
Cornhole Board Building Materials and Tools
To build your own set of regulation-size cornhole boards (24″ x 48″), you’ll need the printable building plan HERE as well as:
- One sheet of 4×8 plywood
- Table Saw (optional, but when you have a sweet table saw workbench like mine, you’ll never want to build without it again)
- Circular Saw
- 4’ long straight edge
- Plywood Circular Saw Blade
- Miter Saw (optional)
- 6″ diameter Hole Saw (optional)
- ¼” Drill bit – for attaching the legs
- Jig Saw
- Pocket Hole Jig
- 7/16” Sockets for lag bolts
- Sander
- Sandpaper 120 and 150
- 3” Foam Brush for polycrylic
- Rags or tack cloths for dusting
- Pencil
- Tape measure
And don’t forget the official cornhole bags so you’ll be ready to play as soon as it’s built!
Tips for a DIY Custom Painted Cornhole Board
If you have access to a projector, that’s an easy way to trace an image onto the cornhole platform. We don’t have a projector and we were itching to *finally* finish up these cornhole boards, plus I had two very willing helpers ready to paint, so I used an old-school art grid trick to transfer the image to the board.
Draw a grid on your inspiration image and then use tape and string to “draw” the grid onto the larger board. Then use those guides to sketch the different sections of the inspiration image. (See the details in the video at about 5:40.) It’s not as fast or easy, but the artist in me really enjoyed it and the girls loved painting in my sketches.
The girls painted on one layer of acrylic paint, which we thinned a bit to make it easier to paint smoothly. To make the colors really vibrant, I added another layer of paint and smoothed out the edges of the painted sections.
Then, to give it a really smooth finish and protect the wood and paint, I added about 3 coats of polycrylic.
How to Play Cornhole
Cornhole seems a lot like the Uno card game: many families make their own in-house cornhole rules! Part of the fun, to me, is making the game more challenging with a farther throwing distance or trick shots, but the standard cornhole rules and gameplay are:
- Place the cornhole platforms (cornhole boards) 30 feet apart.
- Players/teams stand by the opposing team’s board, throwing (AKA pitching) toward their own board.
- Each player/team has 4 corn bags, and the two take turns pitching.
- A bag in the hole scores 3 points; a bag on the platform earns 1 point.
- The first to score 21 points wins.
More DIY Yard Games
jumbo yard dice DIY + YARDZEE printable score card and label
DIY jumbo yard dominoes + printable game instructions and score sheet
indoor-outdoor DIY bowling lane
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