Board Game Theme Party

UPDATE:  I made the files I used for creating my Board Game Theme Party Invitations available (for a small fee) for download at the following link.  It will include blank versions of the invitation (one with reference to a birthday and one without), Candyland Goodie Bag Tags (seen HERE), and the file I used to make the T-shirts.  I hope this makes it easier to get the files as I am not very good about answering email requests!

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My son recently celebrated his 7th birthday.  We limit the kids to a big party every other year which worked out even more perfectly that they fall on opposite years between my two kids.  Then on the "off" years we either do just a family thing or a couple of friends type of celebration.  Well this year was a "big" party for him.  It took us awhile to come up with a theme, but we finally agreed on making it a Board Game theme...you know like Clue, Sorry, Scrabble, Candyland, etc.  He has always loved board games and our overflowing game closet shows it...in the new house we actually have a single game closet which is exciting, but it still needs shelves so that they aren't stacked all on top of each other!  

So since my entire craft room is still in boxes, I had to make the invitation entirely on the computer, but I think it turned out quite nicely.  I tried to incorporate different game titles and the pawn shapes that would become recurrent during the party.

For some decorations, I made Connect 4 tokens and then had my husband hang them from an empty curtain rod...one benefit to just moving into the house!  It turned out very cute but unfortunately didn't last long.  It was hanging right where the kids all ate and I am pretty sure they helped bring parts of it down!  

I managed to find a picture of every kid coming to the party (you could always ask their parents for it) that I needed for a game I had planned...more on that later...so I decided to make a Guess Who game/decoration.  

The Guess Who boards were simply a blue poster board with the pictures of everyone at the party printed on regular copy paper and taped to the backside of the poster board.  I made two "boards" so it could actually be played like Guess Who.  Not sure any of the kids played it at the actual party, but my son enjoyed it afterwards!

During the party, we had a few games ready to play as everyone arrived.  Then I split the kids into two groups (I had 13 kids total) and one group played a double mat Twister (just put two mats next to each other) and the other group played a life-size Candyland game I created in my basement.  I will have a separate post on that one!  Then when each group finished, we switched.  After a pizza and fruit lunch, we then had the kids play a birthday version of Clue that I created.  Probably have to do a separate post on that one too.

One other special thing I did as part of their goodie bags (you guessed it...a separate post on that one too...if I included everything this post would be super long!), I made them all t-shirts with their own color pawn on it and a saying, "Life is a game.  Enjoy playing it!".  When each kid arrived at the party, we had them put a t-shirt on (well almost all of them did) so that they became a "pawn" in our games.  I always make them get together for a group shot using cake and ice cream as an incentive!  

So I have a few more posts on the subject of this Board Game party, so I hope you stick with me.  Until then, thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!