The Flour Game

Tonight we played The Flour Game - a Beckstead family favorite.
I didn't poll all of Robert's siblings to see if they all loved it, but obviously a favorite of Robert's.
You take a cup measure and firmly pack it with flour and a little more.
Then, using your best sand castle making skills, turn it over and carefully tap out the flour.
Turning it over on a newspaper is the best for keeping the area clean.

You might have to smooth out the top a bit.

Then you place a coin, usually a penny, on top in the center of the flour. And you're ready to play.

Taking knives (everyone can have their own or you can pass one or two knives around) you make a cut. One cut straight down. Put the knife in place across the top, cut straight down, and move the flour away.

Then everyone takes turns, continuing to cut away flour. Logan and I were a team until he got the hang of it and wanted to do it himself.

You can make your cuts really close to the penny right off, but the game goes longer if you take your time getting closer to the penny.

As the flour gets cut away some serious thought goes into what the next cut will be.

We had many leaning towers of Pisa.

And wondering how the penny could still be standing.

The person whose cut makes the penny fall loses.

There is one part of the game we did not include tonight and that is the loser (the person who makes the penny fall) has to pick up the penny, from the flour, with their mouth - no hands.
We have a lot of flour lovers in our family - why someone would want to eat flour I don't know - so losing is not that bad for them, they get to eat flour. To minimize the flour faces, we opted against this part.
You can scoop the flour back into the measuring cup (this is when having it on newspaper is helpful), packing it down and play again!