Birthday Party Ideas: “Clue” game party theme

This post has absolutely nothing to do with Disney, but if you’re anything like me, you’re always looking for new birthday party ideas for your kids, so I thought I would share what we did for Colorado Boy’s birthday party over the weekend.

Originally, Colorado Boy wanted to do a “Paris” themed party, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around exactly what we would do for a French-themed party, so I asked him to come up with something else. Luckily, his 2nd idea – a “Clue” themed party – was MUCH easier for me to plan 🙂

The Theme
While inspiration came from the Clue board game, the basic premise was that the kids were detectives trying to solve “The Case of the Missing Birthday Cake”. The invitations and games were built around that idea.

The Invitations
To follow the detective theme, I created some simple invitations that looked like a memo you might find in a detective’s case file. I then designed the envelope to have the shape of a folder on it, similar to the “Confidential” sleeve in a standard Clue game.

The Games
I never know if there are going to be kids who show up a little late, so I like to have a few “warm-up” games to play while we’re waiting for everyone to get there. We came up with two games the kids could use to warm up their “observation” and ” questioning” skills to make sure their detective skills were sharp for solving the missing cake case.

“What’s Missing”: We gathered about 20 different household objects (keys, a banana, a screwdriver, a cub scout patch, etc.) and laid them out on a tray. The kids had 30 seconds to look at everything, then we took it away, removed an item and gave the kids 30 seconds to guess what item was missing. We played 4 or 5 rounds of this, making each round progressively harder with either less time or multiple items missing.

20 Questions: Each child picked a piece of paper with a famous person/character (think Mickey Mouse, George Washington, Indiana Jones, etc.) on it and then the other kids had to ask yes/no questions to figure out who it was. Whoever guessed correctly got the next turn to answer questions and so on, until everyone had had a turn. This game proved extremely popular and we played this for quite some time.

Once the kids’ detective skills were warmed up, they were ready to hunt down the culprit who stole the birthday cake. Before the party, I put together a set of clue cards that had pictures of each of the suspects (family members with names like “The Princess”, “The Driver”, etc.) along with a set of clues leading to different areas around the house. Each clue helped them determine if a suspect was innocent or not, and eventually lead them to the cake which was hidden in the culprit’s “getaway” car that happened to be in our garage. The kids seemed to really enjoy this and the only negative I heard was that it was too short. I only did 6 clues, but they got through those pretty quickly, so I probably should have added a few more.

The Cake
We are extremely lucky to have one of Colorado Princess’ daycare teachers who bakes cakes as a side business, so she was able to take Colorado Boy’s request for a “Clue” board cake and turn it into reality. I didn’t want anything super detailed and I think she came up with just the right balance. We were very happy with how it turned out!

The Goodie Bags
The $1 bins at Michael’s and Target are my favorite places to visit and I was able to find some great items for the goodie bags there. I found nice small spiral notebooks with pens, a Word search book and some mystery gummy candies there and then I also made “Honorary Detective” badges that the kids wore during the party and then added their fingerprint to once they had “solved” the case.

The Supplies
Other than the goodie bag items, the paper and envelopes were already part of my scrapbooking stash, but are available at Michael’s. The badge holders I got at our local Staples and then everything else was just a little imagination and a few Google searches for some appropriate “detective” imagery. I used Photoshop since that’s the program I have, and printed it all out on our home printer.

Colorado Boy and the kids all had a great time so I feel like this theme made for a pretty successful party!

Hopefully my ideas will help inspire you if your kids ever ask for a “Clue” themed party, but I’m curious, what kinds of parties have you done? I’m always looking for ideas, so leave me a comment and let me know what great ideas you have!