Active Easter Party Games and Activities

Easter Egg Hunts

This is a given for any Easter event! If you have a large outdoor space to work with, your egg-seekers will get more physical activity (so fling those eggs far and wide). If you have a large group of hunters, especially with a wide age range, consider creating age-group zones for kids to seek in so toddlers won't get trampled by overexcited older children.

Easter Egg Games

Susan Adcox, the grandparenting expert, has lots of fun ideas for playing with those Easter eggs after your seekers find them all: the Wolf and the Eggs, Hot-Boiled Egg, Egg Toss, Steal the Egg, and several more games starring Easter eggs (raw, hard-boiled, and plastic).

Egg-y Relay Races

Add an Easter twist to any relay race. Start by having participants wear bunny ears and hop from place to place. Then add more Easter charm by using themed props and rules: For a dress-up relay, use bunny tails and noses. For drop-the-penny, use jelly beans or miniature chocolate eggs. And of course, don't forget the classics: egg-and-spoon and armload-of-(plastic) eggs!

Do the Bunny Hop

Line up all your Easter partygoers for a few rounds of the classic bunny hop dance. Here are the steps in case you forgot what comes first:

• Put your right foot out to the side and back in (like the hokey-pokey). Repeat.
• Put your left foot out and back in. Repeat.
• Hop forward, then wait a beat.
• Hop backward, then wait a beat.
• Hop forward three times.
• Do it all over again!

Easter Parade

Maybe your church, community, or neighborhood puts on a parade to showcase their Easter finery. If not, you can march out on your own. Be on the lookout for signs of spring while you're at it!

Capture the Egg

Swap a large plastic or plush egg (or an Easter basket) for the flag, and you can play an Easter-themed edition of Capture the Flag.

Minute to Win It

Play game show host and have party guests take on egg-inspired Minute to Win It games. These are 60-second mini-games that are perfect for filling up small stretches of time, such as when you're waiting for cookies to finish baking. For example, you can have kids race to match identically painted eggs.

Easter Egg Roll

Didn't get an invitation to the famous White House Easter Egg Roll? Host your own, or include one in your Easter festivities. You can use hard-boiled colored eggs or plastic ones. Challenge kids to roll them across a finish line in several different ways: by pushing them with a spoon, gently kicking them with their feet, or even crawling on the ground and using their noses to move the eggs forward. Or come up with more creative ways to move those eggs!

Easter Bowling and Bocce

For bowling, make your own pins using recycled plastic bottles. You can print out bunny pictures to decorate them or fill them with Easter items like jelly beans or those tiny fuzzy chicks. Use a small rubber ball to knock over your pins—or try a hard-boiled egg.

For bocce, use hard-boiled or plastic eggs instead of the typical bocce balls. You need one white egg to serve as the pallina, or target. The goal is to roll the other eggs as close as you can to the pallina without touching it. (If you want to be daring, use a raw egg as the pallina.)

Egg Scramble

This game is adapted from Family Fun magazine. You need at least four or five players. Choose one to be the Bunny; the rest will be the Eggs. Each Egg should choose a color to identify with: the pink egg, the blue egg, the green egg, and so on.

Designate a home base for the Eggs and a separate one for the Bunny. These can be trees, picnic tables, hula hoops or plastic cones, etc. Also, determine a loop that the Eggs will run: from their base to a certain spot in the yard and back. You can make this is simple or as complex as you like, adding instructions (like hopping) and obstacles (like scrambling under a tree branch.

If he gets home safe, the Bunny picks a new color. If the Bunny does tag the Egg, they switch places and the Egg becomes the new Bunny.