Birthday parties are the best! Perhaps the only time of year that you can have a day which is TOTALLY self indulgent.
This 6 year old is particularly keen on two things, Minecraft and Papa Jake… If you haven’t seen Papa Jake, he is a You Tuber who builds (I will contend), rather epic box forts…. Well these seem to go hand in hand don’t they?
Step 1 in our party planning is defining the narrative… an invitation is all well and good, but what’s the call to action?? What’s the mission??
We decided on the following:
“Kids! We need your help!! A portal to the Minecraft realm has opened in our back garden!! We need to close it before the Ender Dragon escapes!! But be careful… It looks like some creatures have already made it through….”
That will do nicely.
Step 2. Consider your goal….. So we know our goal is to close the End Portal. What games/activities can we utilise to do this? We settled on a good old fashioned mentos and coke explosion for the finale of the party.
We created a ‘portal’ out of a cardboard frame and some thin tissue paper in the middle to (hopefully) dissolve in the explosion.
The kids needed to collect the following items throughout the party to DESTROY the Portal!
- Ammunition (Nerf gun bullets)
- Enderpearls (Mentos)
- TNT (Coke bottles in boxes decorated to look like TNT)
DIY Minecraft Portal
Step 3. Tasks. As I have mentioned, our 6 year old is a big fan of a box fort. (I actually organised an event once which consisted of ENTIRELY donated boxes, which kids built into a (kid) life size pirate ship, then castle and more.. I wish I had a time lapse video of it!) …. Anyway, we decided we just had do it. So we created a ‘maze’ inside a box fort, or should I say ‘Mine’.
Inside the mine were small red bags which contained Nerf gun bullets, tipped with tiny pieces of sandpaper (this will make sense shortly)… Each child had to navigate the mine and retrieve 1 bag. It was pretty dark in there and some of the kids found it a little scary! All the better!! 🙂
To spice it up we also stuck up lots of small cardboard ‘mine craft diamonds’ for them to collect (and exchange for sweets at the nearby ‘village’ later).
The next task the kids came face to face with the first monster which had escaped through the portal!! The kids had to ‘creep’ inside the zombie area, to steal a ball with a gold sticker on, which were mixed in with lots of other balls.
These balls had been cut open, filled with Enderpearls (mentos) and glued back together again. One child could go in at a time and be careful not to touch the zombie! This challenge requires one fun Uncle.
Minecraft Zombie Challenge
Now the kids had their Enderpearls, they needed to look for the TNT. They hunted through the forest and found them! But OH NO, they were being guarded by a group of Minecraft Spiders!!
Luckily they had their ammunition in hand, and a couple of Nerf guns to see them off.
There were a few trials as to how to get a Nerf gun bullet to pop a balloon… The first attempt involved glue gunning pins to the top of Nerf gun bullets. (I remember the moment that my partner and I look at each other from across the room, glue gun in hand, and said to each other “perhaps it’s not a good idea to give these to 6 year old’s”)…. Through some trials we discovered sand paper did the job and we were on our way! 🙂
Once the Spiders had all been eliminated the kids retrieved the TNT, and they were all set to destroy the portal!
The kids hunted through the woods and found it, hanging between several trees.
Unfortunately, the adults nearby were unable to capture footage of the portal being destroyed. There were quite a few issues loading the Enderpearls into the TNT, and we had to create a funnel to do it from a rolled up piece of paper. But I can confirm that it was destroyed, and all children left the scene unharmed!
The rest of the party was spent playing in/destroying the box fort and having a marvelous time 🙂
One response to “Minecraft birthday party box fort”
Amazing ingenuity.
Looks like such fun.
Way to go 👍👏🥰