Top 11 activities for a Halloween party
It’s fast approaching one of our favourite seasons of the year, and we are so excited to share some great ideas for Halloween games! Halloween is a perfect time to create an atmosphere of suspense and fun.
It’s a holiday that offers more than just one night of celebration, which means there will be plenty of opportunities to host parties with fall activities, spooky crafts and fun.
Whether it’s for a group of three little friends or a huge group party, we have some awesome activity ideas up our sleeves that we can’t wait to share with you!
Here are our top 8 ideas for Halloween games for your party. These games are easy to set up, budget-friendly, and full of creativity to help everyone enjoy the Halloween spirit.
1. 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.!
2. Table scape creating
A great Halloween activity is to get a disposable paper table cloth and have the kids decorate it spookily for Halloween! Give them pens and colors and let them go free, drawing spidery webs, bubble writing spooky words, and creating scary Halloween-y monsters!
All sitting around and drawing together is such a nice group activity. It gets their creative energy going and is a lovely contrast from sugar-high, high energy games!
3. Pumpkin decorate off
Of course, pumping carving is a Halloween-y classic, but doing that at a party can be chaotic, keeping everyone safe and tabs on knives or carving equipment. Another fun take on carving is a pumpkin decorating competition.
Using the small gourdes, get the kids into teams of 2 or 3 and let them paint a pumpkin in a Halloween theme!
4. 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 FREE TREASURE HUNT FOR YOU!
This tells the story of a haunted house where legend had it there 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 will manages 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. There’s the story, multiple map options to suit any space and even suggestions for tips and tricks to make the hunt even more fun!
5. Pumpkin pinata!
A great activity for any party is a pinata, and a real pumpkin pinata is a perfect take! Of course you can either buy something online and let the kids have great fun smashing it down and scavenging for the sweets.
However, you can also use an actual pumpkin for this! A more aco friendly and more themed activity if you have time to prepare. The inside needs to be carved out and you need to find a way of stringing it up..
6. Halloween mural painting
Cover a wall in large art paper or string up a sheet and let the kids create a Halloween mural!
You can pre-draw something and let them color it in, or give them the freedom to go wild with spooky creatures and spidery webs!
This works great with poster paint (and maybe some glitter glue for added sparkle) but you can also uplevel the activity by offering spray paint cannisters, or glow in the dark, or neon paints.
7. 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!
8. BEST mummy wins
This is a super fun party game. Teams have to wrap up a nominated member to into a mummy costume using rolls of toilet paper.
The teams gat an allocated amount of time 10-15 minutes, and at the end, someone acts as the judge and allocates the best mummy the winner!
Bonus, what can be fun is to think of characters and back stories for the mummies….what might they be buried with? This can help creativity for the judging.
Bonus fun! Another great way to do the judging is to come up with categories for each of the mummies to win, such as mummy least likely to be preserved in 100 years, funniest mummy, most realistic mummy, mummy whos families clearly didnt’ care for them…. the sillier the categories, the better!
9. Neighbourhood scavenger hunt
Around Halloween, neighbourhoods often have fantastic decorations, and this game plays bingo, spotting classic Halloween characters.
Send the kids off in groups if they’re old enough with a scavenger hunt sheet and have them return as soon as they’ve crossed all the items off their list! (Make a reward for completing the task….pumpkin spice hot chocolate and a scary movie, anyone?)
Here is a sample idea of some of the items that could be on their list:
Spiders, Ghosts, Skeletons, A happy pumpkin, spiders web, Something with blood tricking out, Something that belongs to a witch, A coffin, A Character from a scary movie… etc!
10. Skeleton Olympics
This game requires a toy or model skeleton, which is very cheap to pick up around 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!)
11. Decorate your spooky goblet!
This is another crafty game where each kid decorates a paper or plastic cup or goblet cup with halloweeny themed characters.
After the decorating, these are ready to be filled with pumpkin spice hot chocolate or hot cinnamon apple juice!
For paper cups you can use stickers and regular felt tip pens. If you want to give the kids a keepsake you can buy some cheap plastic picnic glasses and let them decorate with permanent marker colours.
Have fun!
We hope these ideas have inspired you for the Halloween season! Remember, no matter how elaborate the decorations are, the most important thing is to have fun in a way that brings the most joy to you and your family.
At Parties Universe, we love simple and creative fun. If you enjoy our style, check out our other posts for more great ideas.
Have a spook-tastic Halloween, and let us know how it goes!
Best of luck, Zoe x
