What to do with 20 6/7 yr old boys in a not-very-big hall?!

[RooTwo]

We've hired a local hall for DS's 7th birthday and now I'm breaking out in a cold sweat wondering what on earth we'll do with them all in there for two hours. It's a perfectly decent size but not that big, not really big enough for too many real running around type games. There is an outside space too, though it'll be late November, so not sure how much/if we'll be able to use it. Any ideas for games and activities to keep them all happy?? It's likely to either be a Star Wars themed party or superheroes. I feel as if we need a central activity/game of some sort that'll kill perhaps half an hour. The rest of the time they can run around and hit each other with balloons It'll be mostly boys but a few girls too. Yikes - why do we inflict these things upon ourselves!

Dancing with prizes for the jumpiest/most like a robot/etc?

Musical statues?

Dancing with last one to sit down eliminated but helping to judge the others?

-Throwing sweeties into a bowl in a short space of time from behind a line- all sweets that they manage to get in the bowl can be collected into a named bag to take home.

Parties i've run / helped at usually last for 1.5 hours and are roughly 30 mins crafts, 30 mins games, 30 mins food.

Crafts usually consists of 3-4 tables to float/rotate around such as

-decorate a biscuit / cupcake with icing and sprinkles (often following the theme - pinterest and google images are your frinds here)

• colour in / decorate a book mark or door hanger for your room

• make and decorate a cape or a mask or party crown

• get a temp tattoo

Games:

• relay team games pass a good chunk of time. eg if you were doing superhero i'd get a cape for each group...first person runs up with the cape then back and passes cape to next in team then they run etc.

• pass the parcel with forfeits

• corners

• musical characters. eg. if superhero you choose 3 heroes and an action for each. when music stops children have to adopt the action / stance for any one of the characters. you hold up a card with one of the 3 characters on it. all people doing that action are out. or win a sweet - whichever you'd rather!

Food:
cake candles first then someone else can cut and bag cake while the rest eat. savoury fist (hot dogs and pizza are by far the least hassle). sweet after.

free play with balloons at the end. or beginning. or both!

secret is to get adult helpers - aunties and uncles, grandparents, godparents etc.

If offering crafts you might find that only the girls do them.

Temporary tattoos and/or face painting?

Team novelty races - eg shuffling along on bottoms to the end line?

Ooh thanks all for fab ideas! Love the superhero musical characters clr2014 ... And several different craft options, and tattoos...

The chocolate game is quite good for confined spaces (take it in turns to roll a die, if you roll a 6 then you put on gloves and try to eat a bar of Dairy Milk with a knife and fork until the next person rolls a 6) - you might need to split 20 kids into 2 groups.

Or the toilet paper mummy game is very popular and quite small-area-friendly lots of mess to clear up at the end though.

Buy a play parachute (ebay - about £20); search google for the games to play. Kids LOVE IT (particularly umbrella, chute basketball, cat & mouse) and as most involve at least 3/4 of the kids having to hold on to the handle at any given time - it anchors them in place!

We did that last year. We did hire a host person party thing and they were great. It was bad enough me having to cater the damn party. I wasn't going to do games as well!!

But from recollection they did the toilet paper mummy thing (boys and girls loved it), they did best dancer (gave out sweets/prizes for the best pose etc), musical statues. Also games like passing a ball over and under (stand kids in a row in two or three teams).

Good luck! I'd say 45 min games activities, 30 min food and cake and then 15 min for the last bits.

Good luck with the party. We did a star wars party last year and had games including building a space ship (get loads of different sized cardboard boxes, stickers and other crafty stuff), a shooting game (get pictures of star wars baddies, put them on paper plates, hang from ceiling, get cheap nerf style guns from pound land and closely supervise!) and a quiz (loads of kids quizzes on the internet. We did ours at home and made each room a different star wars planet but you could do this for each corner of the hall. We made up lunch boxes for the kids to minimise food waste and keep costs down. We also did a death star piñata.

We do our parties for two hours max.

I run a cub pack. Games we do most evenings are. Tell parents not to put them in their Sunday best.
Dodge ball - try to hit the runners with a foam football.
Steven's game - place a row of chair each end of the hall. Divide the kids into 2 teams. Put one kid on each row of chairs. Their team has to score a point by getting him to catch the ball. The thrower of the sucessful catch then joins them until all the team are on the bench.
Eating games (like the chocolate one mentioned earlier). Donuts on strings up high. Get each child to choose a length of string but dont tell them what for. Tie a polo on the end. They have to chew along the string until they reach their polo. Divide into pairs. Give one two bamboo canes. Tell them to eat six marsh mallows. They have to work it out that they use the canes as arms to feed each other. Make a flour sandcastle with a smartie on the top. Each child has to cut a slice off the castle without letting the smartie fall. It will end up on a pillar of flour. The child that lets it fall has to retrieve it with their mouth, hands behind back.
Last week we collected as much cardboard as we could. They build a fort and each team had to defend their fort from newspaper cannon balls. We even dressed two a knights.
If you have access to outside, water relay games are good. Obstacle courses are good indoors too with under the blanket, through the chair legs type of thing.
Could you Army theme it? Then you could do hot dogs as the food as army rations?

Is the hall (and the budget) big enough for a small bouncy castle?