A Nerf War & Capture-The-Flag Birthday Party

This year was my oldest boy's 10th birthday party, and as his birthday approached in February, we knew we wanted to do a special "double digit" party for him.  Our kids don't get birthday parties every year, and with five of them we've had to think about which ages we wanted to plan to be party years.  Hitting the double digits is a special year, so we were thinking about what we could do to celebrate Wyatt.

Our options for parties outside of our house were limited, with most places requiring limits on the number of people or requiring everyone to wear masks.  So we decided to do something creative at home instead.  What we came up with was a Nerf gun war/capture the flag birthday party inside our house!

Since we have limited space in our house, and since I knew this party could get crazy, we limited our invites to just immediate extended family and one close family friend that we knew would be game for a crazy Nerf war.  And it did get crazy, but it turned out to be so much fun!

We basically played capture the flag, with the teams divided between the upstairs and downstairs of our house.  In order to make our house feel like an appropriate environment for a Nerf war, we took down all our breakables, hung up plastic sheets to divide some of the rooms, moved the larger furniture so it could serve as barricades, and planted buckets of darts in strategic places as reloading stations.

For food I made cupcakes, layered finger jello, multi-colored white chocolate fudge, and snacks foods like pretzels and Chex mix, with chili for the main dish.  We also bought little single-shooter dart guns from the dollar store as favors for all the kids!

Each team took some time to hide their flag, and each team had a designated "jail".  People were supposed to freeze for five seconds after they got hit by darts, based on the honor system, and they could be "captured" and walked to the jail (the bathrooms), where they had to wait five minutes, or until a jail break.  The flags had to be hidden in a place where they were visible from three directions (thought that rule got a little tricky).  Everyone got a green or blue bandana and glow stick bracelet, so we could see who was on which team even in the dark.  The first team to bring the opposing team's flag back into their territory won! 

We also came up with a Nerf War Playlist to accompany the mayhem (it's a pretty great playlist, if we do say so ourselves).

We made sure to split up the adults and kids evenly among the teams, and I'm happy to report that no one was injured!  We played three rounds, and we had a blast!  I think it was especially fun for the kids to have the adults playing the game too, and I think it will be a good memory for everyone!