BEST 9 games for a Halloween party

With Halloween just around the corner, we could not be more excited to delve into the spooky supernatural for you and bring you a series of posts on throwing super fun, creating and budget-friendly Halloween parties!

Halloween is such a fun festival to go all out, creating atmosphere, suspense and wonder!

It’s also a great holiday that lasts more than the night itself, meaning there is plenty of opportunity to throw a party with great fall activities, spooky themes crafts and witchy games.

Here we share our top 8 ideas for the best Halloween games for a party. These are simple to set up, budget friendly and full of creativity to help your kids immerse themselves in this brilliant festival.

1. Mummy Relay

This is a really funny party game for a bigger group of players. It’s a relay race. One person from each team is the mummy and they stand at one end of the room.

At the other end, each teams gets a toilet paper. The aim of the game is to wrap the mummy up like a mummy but the twist is that no one is allowed to hold the toilet role for more than 20 seconds (you can make this slightly longer or slightly shorter depending on the kids age if need be!)

This game gets plenty of laughs, and at the end, the ‘best mummy’ wins!

Extra ideas: depending on the group, if there are a lot of kids with parents, I’ve seen this played where the mums of the groups are the automatic mummies….this can be very funny, but only if it’s inclusive to everyone there!

2. Skeleton Search

This is a fun Halloween-themed challenge. Kids have to build a skeleton by searching for the pieces hidden around the house! It works great if you have kids of different ages, as you can have a younger kids’ search zone and an older kids’ search zone with more tricky hiding spots!

The kids have to figure out which bone is which and place the full skeleton together as a team. This is super fun if you can do a life-size version, but a smaller A3 or A4 is also great.

You can draw, trace or print out an image of a completed figure and cut the bones out, or older a picture online to cut up. If the kids need to, you can prompt them with a reference photo, but they could have a pretty good go at it on their own, too.

Bonus tip: when hiding the pieces use tape to stick them on the back or underneath furniture for extra trick hiding spots!

Bonus tip for extra fun: Make this an ‘in-the-dark search’ either by painting the bones with glow-in-the-dark paint or by using bright white and giving the kids a blacklight flashlight for their search. Doing this adds so much extra intrigue that it is great fun!

3. Pumpkin Golf

This is a fun game! Pumpkin golf and pumpkin toss are similar, you carve a pumpkin with a super ghoulish open mouth, and take t in turns to hit a golf ball in, (or perhaps throw a ping pong ball in).

If you’re playing the golf variant, you might need to create a little ramp up to the mouth; you can use anything for this, even home cardboard or something similar.

It is a game the whole family can play together, and you can also make it into a tournament for a big group with knock-out dares and winners prizes!

4.     Spooky lucky dip

This is the funniest game for a party, and will have the kids shrieking and laughing before you know it! Fill a bowl with a strange textured food item put it in box or cover with a cloth so the kids can’t see what’s in it.

Mix a Halloween toy (like a spider or a skeleton bone or a pumpkin toy into the mixture and have the kid reach a hand in and search for it). Some suggestions for fun food items to use are:

• The seedy, stringy inside of a pumpkin
• Spaghetti covered in oil to make it slippery and strange
• Frothy washing up liquid bubbles
• Cereals in milk
• Canned beans with the canning liquid intact

Not being able to see these makes the game so suspenseful and fun!

As the kids are feeling you can call out suggestions for what you think it is…the more gruesome the better…. “ does it feel like witch intestines?”, “ I know it’s frogs eyeballs….” Etc.!

5. Pumpkin Sweep Hockey

This is a creative pumpkin game….2 or 3 kids get a sweeping brush and have to sweep the pumpkin to their end of the field before the other player sweeps it to their end!

Brushes have to stay on the floor! At the end of each point, the players swap in and out so that everyone gets a go! You can let the players come up with spooky team names such as the super-spiders or winning-witches (feel free to come up with much better suggestions than these too!)

6. Spooky Bingo

This is bingo but with spooky Halloween equipment! Set up a lucky dip bag with Halloween-themed items and make bingo cards with these items on.

Let the kids come up one by one to pull something out of the bag. Then, they cross that item off their sheet. All the sheets have items arranged in a different order, so the first kid to get a full row or a full column is the winner!

7. Halloween Treasure Hunt

We love a good group challenge, and one of the best activities for a party is a treasure hunt!

It’s actually our speciality at Parties Universe, and we have CREATED A TREASURE HUNT FOR YOU!

This tells the story of a haunted house where legend has it that once lived a witch who knew the location of a heap of treasure! But to keep it secret, she tore apart the map. If the group can find all the pieces inside the haunted house, they will find the treasure!

But the house is very spooky. Who knows what’s lurking in the corners and whether you’ll manage to stay inside long enough to complete the map!

This is a super easy-to-set-up PRINTABLE DIY hunt. We’ve created everything you need: the story, multiple map options to suit any space, and even suggestions for tips and tricks to make the hunt even more fun!

8. Name on head game

This classic party game works so well with a Halloween twist! Everyone gets a sticky note and writes the name of a Halloween character on it to tick on the forehead of the person beside them.

Once everyone has a sticky note, you go around the circle asking yes and no questions to guess who your character is. Yes, answers mean you get another question. No answers mean it passes on to the next person in the circle!

For this theme, you can be as creative and obscure with characters as you like. Think about iconic characters from scry movies, classic haloween character such s witches and ghosts, and even helloween inanimate items like pumpkins and spiders webs!

9. Skeleton Olympics

This game requires a toy or model skeleton, which is very cheap to pick up around the Halloween season in any decorations shop. It can be a 2D model as long as the joints can move.

The game is played like charades, but instead of acting out a movie, the kids position the skeleton to be performing an Olympic sport, and the others have to guess the sport. If you’ve smashed all the sports, you can move on to other categories like professions or animals.

It works great if kids are in teams in case the skeleton needs manoeuvring of many limbs at once!

Bonus Points: If you have a black light, and a bright white skeleton figure (such as one made of paper), doing this take in the dark under a blacklight adds extra fun and makes it look like the skeleton is moving without help! (so long as the kids are dressed in darker colours!)

Have fun!

We hope you’ve loved some of these ideas and that you’re feeling inspired for the season! Remember, no matter how elaborate the decorations around you, the most important thing is for you to have fun, and to do it in the way that brings the biggest joy to you and your family.

We love simple and creative fun here at Parties Universe, and if you like our style, you might love your other posts…

Have a spook-tastic Halloween, and please let us know how you get on!

Best of luck, Zoe x