Dress the Princess for the ball! In this game you will need plenty of costume items – don’t worry if you are short, you can always make up the numbers with items fashioned from newspaper, crepe paper, ribbons or whatever you have lying around.
The story of this Princess party game runs like this : an evil witch has it in for the Princess (strangely enough!) and has cast a spell on the Princess the night of the Royal Ball! This spell has caused all of the Princess’s finest things to be scattered to the four corners of the kingdom.
The contestants are divided into teams, from each team they select a Princess who is to be dressed. The remaining team members must scurry around to the four corners of the kingdom (which are the corners of the room or yard or field – wherever you are playing) to fetch the Princess’s fine things and get her ready for the Royal Ball.
The rules are very simple. You may only carry one item at a time and you must place each item correctly upon your Princess before moving off to find the next item.
As you will quickly see, this game can be fleshed out as much as you like. The more costume items you have, the more members each team can have. If you have many many sets of costume then the teams can be as few as two players. In this case you might run the game twice allowing each player to perform each task once.
At the end you can have a grand entrance to the Royal Ball with the freshly costumed Princesses. If you run this game to the clock, it can be very funny as each Princess arrives in a state of disarray – perhaps with only one slipper on or a gown on backwards!
What variations of this game can there be? Well depending on the age group, you might have the making of the costumes as part of the game. For older players it can also be great fun (and extend the game’s time) if the players are allowed to hide pieces they find that belong to the other team! Your options are to run this game to the clock or until each Princess is dressed just right. This will depend on the mood of the party.
Also you might consider hiding some or all of the items before the game, so the team members must search for some hard to find items. This is a game that you would run on a points system – so if you are running the game to the clock, for very competitive parties you could score a point for each item that is correctly worn by the Princess once time has run out.
To recap : Dress the Princess(es) for the ball by searching for their costumes piece by piece
Major variants:
- Dress until the Princess has a complete outfit for the ball
- Dress as fast as you can until the timer runs out
Minor variations:
- Create the costume items as a craft activity
- Hide some pieces before the game for extra difficulty