If birthday parties aren’t something you’re used to planning, it could be challenging to come up with good birthday games for kids. Maybe you’re throwing a birthday party for your son and inviting his friends; you know for a fact that boys can be energetic and rowdy. That’s your starting point: Boys enjoy games that are fun and require activity. Let’s go over a few ideas.

If you are having the birthday party in the summer, or when there is warm weather, a water gun fight would be a blast. You can have the boys split up into teams like the classic cowboys and Indians game. The object of this birthday game for kids is to get the opposite team as wet as possible. In your invitations, you will want to tell your guests to bring an extra pair of clothes, especially if the weather isn’t warm enough to dry everyone off in time for the cutting of the cake. You can find really good deals at your local dollar store. Water guns come in all sorts of fun colors and sizes.

Birthday games for kids don’t have to be extravagant. Boys will even like playing three-legged races. When playing this game, it is important that boys of similar sizes match up so no injuries occur. You will want to pair up the boys into two teams. Each pair will tie themselves together; one right leg to the other’s left leg. The goal of each pair is to finish the race first. If you want to create more of a challenge for older boys, you can have this be part of an obstacle course.

Another fun game is dress-up. You may think only girls would like to do something like this, but that is not the case. You can have boys dress up and recreate a scene from their favorite pirate movie, for example. If you are going along with a pirate theme, a treasure hunt would be very fun.

The spoon race is another fun idea as far as birthday games for kids go. It’s easy to set up, too. All you need are spoons and fruits, small balls, eggs, or some other small objects to balance on the spoon. The objective is to have teams hold the spoon with their teeth, and then pass it down the line. The team that wins is the one that passes down the spoon to the end of the line without using hands or dropping the object. This may be too much of a challenge for younger boys, though.

Those are just a few ideas for birthday games for kids. Hopefully you’ve been inspired to come up with some of your own, too.