The Best Halloween Party Games For Kids

Directions

1. Fill a big basin or an unused bathtub with water and drop in about a dozen apples. Kids take turns using only their mouth to grab an apple—no hands allowed. Anyone who succeeds gets to eat the apple and receives a small prize.
2. Set up bowling pins, empty soda bottles (painted white to look like ghosts), or toilet paper rolls with spooky faces drawn on them. Each player rolls three small pumpkins to knock over as many targets as possible.
3. Arrange 5 or 6 large pumpkins about 5 meters from a throwing line. Each child gets three tries to toss a hula hoop so it lands over a pumpkin. For younger kids, move the pumpkins closer.
4. Draw a witch without a hat on a large poster board, or use a store-bought poster. Cut out witch hats (or cat tails) from construction paper with double-sided tape. Blindfold a child, spin them gently, then have them try to stick the hat or tail as close to the correct spot as possible. Variations include pinning a smile on a skeleton or a nose on a pumpkin.
5. Split kids into pairs. One child is the mummy, and the other wraps them entirely in toilet paper or crepe paper streamers. For older children, set a time limit. Award a prize to the best mummy.
6. Everyone stands in a circle and quickly tosses a small gourd from person to person. If you drop the gourd, you are out.
7. Place a selection of spooky items inside a sealed box with a hole for inserting an arm—include gummy worms, fake spiders, peeled grapes or olives (like eyeballs), cooked spaghetti, pumpkin innards, lumpy cooked Jell-O, Play-Doh, and small Halloween candies. Each child takes a turn reaching in to find a candy bar while feeling the creepy textures.
8. Fill pie dishes with whipped cream and hide gummy worms inside. Without using their hands, children must try to pull out as many gummy worms from the cream as they can.
9. Kids line up and race while balancing a gourd on top of their head. If the gourd falls off, they must return to the start and try again.
10. Remove all aces and kings from a deck except one of each. Deal the remaining cards evenly. The player who gets the king is the detective, and the one with the ace is the murderer. When the lights go out, the murderer silently taps other kids on the shoulder; those tapped fall down and play dead. If a child discovers a body, they yell “murder in the dark,” and the lights come back on. The detective then guesses who the murderer is from the still-living players.
11. Divide the group into teams, give each team a checklist of spooky items to find, and set a time limit. The first team to collect all items on the list wins.
12. Set up a few trick-or-treat buckets in a group about 10 feet away from the players. Each child takes turns tossing Halloween candy into the buckets. At the end, they get to keep everything they landed inside.
13. Play a Halloween-themed Tic Tac Toe using two colors of small pumpkins (like white and orange) for markers, and dried corn husks arranged to form the grid.