New game! Cats & Flowers

Not too long ago, I was invited to a hen’s night out for one of my ex-colleagues. The organiser of the party was another younger ex-colleague from the same department.

“Alanna,” the text invite started, “we’re doing these station games for Mel. Do you have any ideas? Because our ideas are very bad.”

In Singapore, like in many parts of the world, the aim of the hen’s night is typically to cause some kind of embarrassment for the bride-to-be, and to get her as drunk as possible. The drinking part was set, as we were out on ladies’ night with copious amounts of free drinks at the eatery we were going to be at. But this concept of “very bad” for the station games needed to be clarified.

“Well, what’s up so far?”

She then proceeds to tell me about how the first station game would be to film a Boomerang (you know, those self-rewinding short videos) of Mel the bride with many other people pretending to ride a bicycle.

“…. Is this young people’s idea of fun? hahaha” I responded.

“Save us from lameness. By the way, I’m putting you in charge of the first station because I’m sure you can come up with something better.”

And so with less than 24hrs to come up with something considerably more interesting than a Boomerang of a Human Bicycle… here we go.

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I was completely stuck until the morning of the event and I was almost resigned to just doing the silly human bicycle game. For a little inspiration, I decided to look at other typical bridal games online in hopes that I could quickly adapt something that would be suitable for our purpose – something that could be played on-the-go and would make for some great pictures or videos for the bride.

There were several interesting ideas, but thought that everything lacked pizzazz and a randomisation or chance factor, which in my opinion adds a good dash of “fun” to such casual games. I decided to mash several games together to create a scavenger hunt with a twist.

The idea: two decks of cards; one with certain archetypes of men (man with hipster facial hair, man wearing a plaid shirt, etc), the other with a mildly embarrassing action. The bride would then have to randomly pull from both decks, look for the male depicted on the card, and then have a picture taken of the two of them performing the embarrassing action. The deck separation gave us a chance to do some permutations too in case we needed more than 5 rounds. It was easy for us to do on the go too, as we were moving from one location to the other via public transport. Rather than doing all the rounds at one stop, we made the bride do one at every stop we made, for a fresh crowd and new physical spaces to do silly actions.

With the help of some markers and art references, I quickly drew up some cards for the game (in the 30 mins before i had to leave the house hahaha). For quick reference, I pasted washi tape on the back – cats for the cards with the archetypes, and flowers for actions. We ended up calling the game “Cats and Flowers”. 🙂

Overall it was met with much laughter and enjoyment from spectators. The actions were designed to be mildly embarrassing but not too much for my conservative office. My colleagues had brought along a giant speaker, so someone (me, that someone was me) had the wise idea to play “My Heart Will Go On” very loudly in public while the bride and a poor black frames-wearing passerby were Jack and Rose from the Titanic. I think the rest of us ended up being more embarrassed by that than the bride herself, hahaha.

What game have you whipped up in just a few hours to much entertainment? Let us know in the comments!