Wedding Games

Photo by Paul Summerfield

When planning the wedding, one of the first things we came up with was having games out for guests to play throughout the day. We've been to a few weddings where during that lull between the ceremony and the wedding breakfast it can get a little boring, so we wanted to make sure that didn't happen at ours.

Our wedding venue had a conservatory which was perfect for setting up the games. Although, our wedding day was quite a scorcher and the conservatory got really hot so people took the games outside which worked just as well.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

Here are the games we chose:

Bananagrams, Scattergories and Dobble
These are family favourites and hopefully now many more people's favourites. My bridesmaid Steph has already been out to buy her own Dobble. These games were great for bringing people together, whether it be friends, family, groom's side or bride's side.

Wordsearch tablecloth
My Mum bought this from B&M years ago and we haven't been able to find another one since. It's just a giant plastic sheet with letters printed all over it. This one has all of the countries to find and we supplied crayons to mark them, which meant it could be wiped down to use again.

Coin pusher
Andrew and I are big fans of the 2p machines. We even went to the arcade at the bowling alley on our second date. I can't remember who's idea it was to see if they make smaller versions but we found one on Amazon and had to have it for our wedding.
The machine came with plastic coins but we found using real 1p coins much better. I emptied out my purse, looked down the sofa and, with the help of a friend who manages a shop, had enough coins to play with.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

'Guest' Who
Years ago I'd seen someone had made a personalised Guess Who game and thought it would be perfect for a wedding. I bought an old set from a charity shop for £1.50, which was one of the first things we bought for the wedding last summer. We picked 24 of our nearest and dearest, including ourselves, and I scoured Facebook to find photos of them all. I edited the photos on Photoshop so they were just floating heads like in the real game. I printed, laminated and cut up the photos then slotted them into place. I think it was fun for some of our guests to see themselves in the game and it got handed around serveral people during the day. Two of my bridesmaids used some 'alternative' questions to play like, 'would this person order a lemon and herb at Nandos?' and 'would this person enjoy the surprise aisle at Aldi?'. Not sure how successful that was...

Photo by Paul Summerfield

We also made a quiz for the tables at the reception and people got really into it! We included 20 questions which were very loosely linked to use, like 'Andrew and Lisa went to Seattle for their first holiday. What is the name of Seattle's American football team?'
After the speeches one of the groomsmen read out all the answers and we bought the winning table a round of drinks. It was a great way to get people talking on their table, especially where we'd put people who didn't know each on the same table.

Having the games was such a good idea and I hope it's one of the things that people remember about our wedding in the years to come.