Baby & Bridal Shower Game Pack

Five games, one page each

The pack prints as a small booklet with one game to a page. A word scramble on the theme, a "how well do you know them" trivia quiz, a wishes and advice card, a price-is-right guessing game, and a find-the-guest mixer.

Choose baby or bridal and the wording changes throughout. Put in the guest of honour's name, who is hosting, and a title of your own if the default does not suit. Print only the games you want.

The mixer is the one that earns its place

Run find-the-guest first, before anybody settles into a chair.

A shower usually mixes two or three groups who do not know each other — family, old friends, work colleagues — and left alone they will sit in those groups all afternoon. A sheet that requires finding someone who has been abroad this year, or who has the same birthday month, forces circulation without anybody having to be told to circulate.

Run it while people arrive rather than as a formal activity.

The wishes card is the one people keep

Everything else gets recycled. This one goes in a memory box.

Print it on decent paper, give people a proper pen, and let them fill it in quietly rather than under time pressure. Collect them at the end and put them in an envelope — the guest of honour will not read them on the day and will read them properly in about a fortnight.

Keep the trivia kind

The quiz is about the guest of honour, which means it sets the tone for the whole afternoon.

Questions people can guess at with a bit of affection work; questions only two people could possibly know just make everyone else feel like an outsider. If you are writing your own, aim for the ones where a wrong answer is funny rather than embarrassing.

How many to actually play

Fewer than the pack contains. Two or three is plenty.

A shower that runs five structured games back to back leaves no room for the thing people came for, which is talking to each other. Print the full set, then use them as options and abandon the last two without ceremony if the room is happy as it is.

Practical bits

Print one per guest, plus a couple spare. Have pens ready: running short of pens is far and away the commonest way one of these games stalls halfway through. Decide the prizes beforehand and keep them small, because the winning matters more than the thing won.

Related: the party and event planner for the rest of the day, and the bingo card generator if you want a themed bingo alongside.