Festival Scale Party Games
Just the phrase “party games” probably brings something specific to mind — whether it’s a kids party or a board game night, you probably aren’t thinking about festivals or nightclubs when you hear those words. That’s because most party games don’t scale, or are most often included in events that don’t have large interactive art, live music, and other components we tend to think of when we imagine really spectacular nightlife.
But it turns out, there are games and activities that can add a layer of play and structure to even the most stacked festival lineup. Here are some of my favorites that I’ve encountered over the years:
*BINGO — but make it extremely weird and full of spectacle. The now closed New Orleans Bingo Show was a smash hit phenomenon that blended a live concert and variety show with rounds of Bingo (with prizes) for audience participation. Later, Psychedelic Friendship Bingo was born and took this concept into an even more surreal direction, mashing it up with a parody of celebrity squares. Bingo is great because it costs fairly little in terms of materials, and can be played by very large groups, it’s a great way to make a proscenium format event (like a stage show) into something interactive. I grew up going to Disco Bingo at a family summer camp, and it was one of few events that appealed to people across all age demographics.
*Bounty Hunting — which I first encountered at Wasteland Weekend, and lets participants join in as either wanted outlaws, or freelance bounty-hunters in a festival-wide game of cat and mouse, infusing your interactions at the festival with both purpose and adrenaline.
Somewhere at your event, set up a bounty hunting headquarters with blank wanted posters and pens/pencils, as well as a cork-board or other display surface for posters that have been filled out. Anyone who wants to potentially be hunted as a wanted criminal during the event can accurately describe themselves, include a name they use, maybe sketch a self-portrait, and for fun write what crimes they are wanted for, and then leave the poster at the bounty hunter’s station.
For someone who wants to play as a bounty hunter, all they have to do as pick a wanted poster and set out to find that person. Depending on how you want the game to play out, you can set the rules for “capturing the bounty” various ways, just make sure it’s very clear what is and isn’t allowed, and that everyone has consented to play the same way (communicating these rules will be the key task of your game-team.)
Once a bounty has been found and “captured” and presented at the bounty hunter’s HQ, you can decide whether or not to include an element of rewarding that player — at one of my Western themed parties we gave out star stickers to successful bounty hunters. People play for the game, not the prize, but some kind of acknowledgement of success is nice to have.
*ARGs and puzzle games — threading narrative purpose through your event and encouraging collaboration and exploration with scavenger-hunts, puzzles, and calls to action. ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game and is “an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions.” It’s a large and creatively rich style of game creation with a lot of options and room to scale, both allowing you to create something engaging and unstaffed, or invite actors and performers to be a part of the world, story, and puzzles. A good ARG is an unobtrusive addition to an event, not impacting those who aren’t interested in playing, but attracting interest, exploration, and team collaboration amongst those who are. In highly engaging, social environments, attention spans tend to be extra-short, so bear this in mind and try not to require lots of deep-focus elements like reading long blocks of text in your ARG.
*Find Yourself — I attended a private festival in 2016 that had one of my favorite social-mixers ever, and it deserves a mention here. It was simple, low-cost, and lead to a lot of really fun (and funny) interactions and connections. Guests received the name-tag of another attendee at the gate and then spent the event trying to find themselves. It was a parody of a self help summit, so the game tied into the theme perfectly, but I think it would work in a lot of settings.
*Frick Frack Blackjack — this popup installation features card gambling for anything but cash — think bartering with peculiar objects. This game is as interesting as your players are, so make sure you encourage guests to bring truly odd and interesting objects to gamble with to keep conversations lively. Their card dealer who can really entertain people counts for a lot, and the visual display of the cards table, signs and prizes serves up a lot of charm. Not a lot of people can play at once, but games can be fairly high throughput and reach a lot of attendees over time.
*Rubber Ducky Derby — this is really an entire category of entertainment, because the type of body of water that you “race” rubber ducks across can be anything from a natural river to a slip n slide, as long as it has space across which the rubber ducks can float or coast, and you have a bunch of rubber ducks with differentiating features (such as numbers that have been added to them.) You can dress the event up with as much ceremony as you like, parody the Kentucky derby with the wearing of extravagant big hats and serving of thematically appropriate drinks, or keep it casual. To prevent stuck ducks, it can help to have crew available to move the ducks along the edges of the water with a push brooms or pool-cleaning tools. Make sure you have someone recording the finish line to accurately determine which duck came in first. What kind of prize you provide for the lucky winner is entirely up to you.
There’s a lot out there for big groups: scavenger hunts, capture the flag, laser tag, obstacle-course races, trivia games, improv games that call on volunteers to entertain a larger audience, and more, you just have to get creative. That said, more than half of the joy of any of these concepts is in how you execute them, so if you run rounds of bar trivia at your festival — the real art is in how you make it fun and unique to the context of your specific event. Generic is dull, speak to your audience and reference the internal culture of the events themselves with whatever you do.
