Baby Shower Games People Actually Want to Play

Most lists of baby shower games give you thirty options in no particular order, so ten of them look equally worth doing and you end up picking by taste the night before. A better way to choose starts with the afternoon itself: two hours, a room of people who mostly do not know each other, and a guest of honor who will sit at the front while everyone watches her open presents. A game earns its place when it fills a stretch where people would otherwise stand around with nothing to say.

How many games a two hour shower needs

A two hour shower falls into four stretches of roughly half an hour each: guests arriving, food and cake, opening gifts, and the time after the cake when people decide whether to stay. Gifts take about ninety seconds each to hand over, open, hold up and say thank you for, so twenty guests means about thirty minutes of gifts.

Food needs no game, because people are busy eating. That leaves three stretches that can use one: arrivals, gifts, and the time after the cake, and that last one only if the room is still full. Three games is plenty, and if the shower is also a gender reveal, the reveal can fill the time after the cake on its own.

Three questions to sort any game

Can everyone play it sitting down? The guest of honor is late in her pregnancy, somebody's mother has a bad knee, and somebody else is holding a toddler, so a relay race leaves out three people, including the one everybody came for.

Does it spare everyone embarrassment, the guest of honor most of all? She agreed to be the center of attention, and a game that turns her body or her guests into the joke asks for more than that.

Does it use only things you already have? Index cards, pens, paper plates and a bag of clothespins pass, and anything that needs a printer or a shopping trip does not.

Four traditional games worth cutting

Guess the belly size. Guests cut a length of string they think will fit around her belly, and she has to stand while every string is wrapped around her in front of the room until the closest one wins.

Melted candy in a diaper. Guests pass around diapers smeared with melted chocolate bars and guess the brand by smell, which is a joke about what goes in a diaper, played next to the food.

Drinking from a baby bottle. Adults race to drain a bottle through a nipple while everyone watches, and the guests who would rather not are easy to spot.

Word scramble worksheets. They need a printer, and they turn ten minutes of the afternoon into everyone looking down at paper without talking.

No one measures which shower games guests dislike, so these cuts are judgment rather than data. If the family has played the belly string game at every shower for twenty years, it belongs to them and it stays.

Game	Everyone can play sitting down	Spares everyone embarrassment	Uses only things you have
Guess the belly size	no	no	yes
Melted candy in a diaper	yes	no	no
Drinking from a baby bottle	yes	no	no
Word scramble worksheets	yes	yes	no
Clothespins and a banned word	yes	yes	yes
Guess cards	yes	yes	yes
Baby photo guessing	yes	yes	yes
Who knows the parents best	yes	yes	yes
Paper plate portraits	yes	yes	yes

Free baby shower games for each part of the afternoon

Arrivals: clothespins and a banned word. Clip a clothespin on each guest at the door and tell them the word "baby" is banned for the afternoon. Anyone who hears someone else say it takes that person's clothespin and clips it to their own shirt, and whoever is wearing the most at the end wins. Latecomers get a pin when they walk in, and the game gives strangers a reason to talk to each other from the first minute.

Arrivals, for guests who would rather not play: advice cards. Leave a stack of index cards and pens by the door for one line of advice or a wish for the parents, which they get to keep.

Gifts: guess cards. Hand each guest an index card as they arrive. On the front they write their guess for the baby's birth date and weight, and on the back they write five gifts they think are in the pile. During the gifts they cross off each one that appears, so everyone has something to do while one person opens presents. Most crossed off wins the gift round, and the parents keep the cards and text whoever guessed closest on the birth date and weight once the baby arrives.

After the cake, pick one of these three.

Baby photo guessing. Ask every guest to send a photo of themselves as a baby when they reply to the invitation, and keep them in an album on your phone. Pass the phone around and let the room guess who is who.

Who knows the parents best. Write ten questions about the parents on a card, like where they met, who cooks, and who will cry first at the birth. Read each one aloud, let the room call out answers, and have the parents give the real one.

Paper plate portraits. Everyone holds a paper plate on top of their head and draws the baby without looking, and the parents pick the winner. The drawings are always terrible, which is what makes it funny, and nobody is better at it than anyone else.

If you need one more, the baby animal quiz works anywhere: read out an adult animal, like a kangaroo, swan or goat, and guests write down the baby's name, which would be joey, cygnet and kid.

Before Saturday

Take one index card and write the four stretches with a start time next to each, then write one game next to arrivals, gifts and the time after the cake. Buy a bag of clothespins if the house has none. That is all the preparation these easy baby shower games need.

If the room is already talking at any point, skip the game. A game is there to get people talking, and if they already are, stopping them to hand out cards only gives you another job.