Last year I made a video game for my family to play on Christmas. I didn't have much money at the time so it was part of my gift to everyone. It ended up being a simple board game where tokens moved forward on a timeline, the past year, and the goal was to reach the end. Once everyone made it to the end of the game it would tally up memory points and determine the winner.
The memory points were gained by landing on event spaces. There were 10 major event spaces and 15 minor event spaces. The major events had something to do with our family in the past year like when someone got a new job. The events were placed in the timeline in the month it occurred in (each month having 10 spaces). Minor events were just generic things like buying a cup of coffee or having to shovel snow. They could add or subtract to your score while the major events only added.
Other spaces included move ahead/backward squares and lose a turn. It's generic to most board games but added enough variety to make the game fun. It was all done on the computer so I stored the board layout in a file and loaded it at the beginning of the game. That made it easier to test different layouts.
To move our tokens I decided to use physical dice instead of randomly generating numbers on a computer. This allowed me something to give my family before showing the game to pique their interest. I also did it this way so that my parents felt they had control. After each turn, I simply input the die roll into the computer to advance the game.
Overall it might have taken me a week or so to get the game done in my free time. The result was something that my entire family enjoyed and let us reminisce the past year. If enough people are interested in the project I might consider putting it up on GitHub.