What it is: A great game to play at showers (baby or bridal), my mom’s favorite shower game. With good reason. I love it, too: it’s fun, entertaining, informative, helps you get to know each other, and gives all the guests (not just the guest of honor, though we all love her, too) a chance to share.
Best for: A shower! You could adapt this game to birthday parties too, I’m sure, but the free printables I have below are for bridal and baby showers.
What you need: You need a printed-out questionnaire for each guest to fill out (use mine below, or make your own). The questionnaire should have a few get-to-know-you questions on it (we’ll get to those later). Each guest also needs something to write with, and that’s it!
How to play: Basically, this shower game involves giving each of your guests a set of questions to answer. Then you read the answers out loud.
So first, on creating the questionnaire. Basically you just want three to five questions that guests can answer about themselves. Because everyone loves hearing all about the guest of honor, but people do love talking about themselves, too. And if you craft the questions carefully, they can tie in to your shower perfectly. You can have questions about advice, you can have questions about honeymoons, you can have just fun get-to-know you questions that would be fun to answer and read aloud. For example, for a bridal shower you could use questions like these:
- Where did you or would you like to honeymoon?
- What is one of the best gifts you’ve ever been given?
- What is something you wish you had right now?
- What is your favorite dessert?
- If your love life were made into a movie, which chick flick would it most resemble?
- In eight words or less, what is your best advice for the first year of marriage?
- What is your best advice for getting through a wedding day?
And for a baby shower:
- In eight words or less, what is your best advice for having a new baby?
- What’s one story your parents tell about you as a baby?
- What size were you when you were born?
- For mothers: How long was your longest labor? And how long was your shortest?
- What’s one of the best creative mothering tips you’ve done or seen?
- What is one distinctive feature about the way you looked as a baby?
- What is one baby boy/girl name you love?
So create your questionnaire, keeping in mind that you just want a few questions; it doesn’t need to be long.
When we played at my sister’s bridal shower, we set the questionnaires and a jar of pens by the front door, with a sign telling everyone to take one and fill it out. You could also hand them out after the shower has started.
Give your guests time to go over the questionnaires and answer them. This can be done all at once or in the background as the shower is going on. After everyone has had time, start collecting the answers. Once you have them all, have one person (like the person throwing the shower) stand up and read the answers aloud. A fun way to do it is to read the answers, but not the name, and have all the guests guess which guest filled out that questionnaire.
It’s just a fun way to hear from everyone, get to know each other, and talk about weddings or babies. After the shower, you can give the stack of questionnaires to the bride/expectant mother as a keepsake and a way to keep track of advice (make sure everyone wrote her name down). If you’re really on top of it, you could put them in a little photo album or something. 🙂
Variations: There’s some other things you could do with the answer sheets. Instead of just reading them all, you could have someone pre-read them and choose one or two answers (the funny ones) to share from each guest’s questionnaire. Then have someone stand up, announce the guest’s name, and read her selected answers out loud. If you want to make more of a game of it, you could choose a “winner” for each question, or the few best answers (like the longest labor, the most elaborate honeymoon, etc.). Read the winning responses aloud, and you could even give out prizes.
Printables: Here’s the printable list of questions I mentioned. Just print, copy, and cut and you can have a stack of questions to give to your quests. Feel free to make your own to fit your specific situation, too! For example, for my sister, who was proposed to on a trip to Europe, we had some questions about European vacations. You could easily fit this shower question game to the theme of your shower.
Bridal shower questions