What To Do At A Baby Shower When Nobody Wants To Play Games

You have a room booked, a cake ordered, nineteen women coming and a printable pack of baby shower games open in another tab that you cannot bring yourself to buy. Melted chocolate in nappies. Guess the size of her stomach with a length of string. A timed race to pin a paper nappy on a doll.

You are not being a snob about it. You are quietly working out which of your nineteen guests would rather be swallowed by the floor, and the answer is most of them, including the one the whole afternoon is for.

So here is the useful way to think about what to do at a baby shower. Forget the activity list. The only question that matters is what you are asking a guest to do, and it sits on a ladder from nothing at all up to fully involved. Pick the rung, then pick the thing. Do it the other way around and you end up with the nappies.

Why baby shower games have the reputation they do

Plenty of people genuinely love them, and if your group is that group, run them and have a brilliant afternoon. But there is a reason the eye-roll exists, and it is worth naming.

Most shower games fall into two piles. The first is guessing games about a woman's body. How wide is she, how much has she gained, what does she look like from the side. Even played with total affection, it is an activity where nineteen people study her shape and say a number out loud. Some women find that hilarious. Others smile through it and remember it for a decade.

The second pile is scored competition between people who have never met. The guest beside the aunt from Toowoomba has to beat her at a timed task, in a lounge room, at two in the afternoon, sober. Competition works when there is a relationship to be playful inside. Between strangers it produces a winner, a loser and a slightly loud silence.

Underneath both piles is the structural problem. Games put the mum to be on display. She sits in the good armchair while the room faces her, guesses about her and applauds her. She is already being looked at more than usual, by strangers in the supermarket, by relatives with opinions, by a midwife with a tape measure. Hours of being the exhibit is a strange gift for someone who is quietly exhausted. None of which means the afternoon should be a silent tea. It means the involvement has to point somewhere other than her.

The actual design problem, and it is not the games

A baby shower guest list is the widest mix of ages and relationships a woman will ever assemble in one room. Her twenty-two year old cousin. Two friends from a job she left in 2016. Her mother. Her mother-in-law, who has brought her own mother. Two school mums. Someone from her antenatal group she has met twice.

No other party does that. A hens night is her friends. A shower is every era of her life at once, plus his family, and half of them have never been in a room together. Two more constraints shape everything you choose.

The gift stretch, and how to make it disappear

Every shower hits it. She unwraps a bunny suit, holds it up, everyone says "oh that is gorgeous", and someone hands her the next one. Repeat nineteen times. The first four are lovely. By the ninth, the back rows are on their phones and she is running out of adjectives while performing gratitude on camera.

The fix is not to skip gifts, it is to stop making them the show. Open them while something else is going on, so the room can watch or not watch and she can react like a human rather than a presenter. Or set them aside for home and say so when guests arrive, so nobody feels their present went unnoticed.

Rung one: guests are asked to do nothing

Food, drinks, chairs, music, talk. The oldest format there is, and for a small shower it is the right answer more often than the internet admits.

Good at: intimacy, low effort, and giving the mum to be conversations rather than an audience.

Who it suits: ten or twelve people who mostly know each other, or a morning tea for her closest few. If she has said outright that she wants no fuss made, the guide to planning for someone who hates a fuss is the better read.

Where it falls down: past about twelve guests, a room with no job in it splits, along the lines you would predict. The ones who know each other clump in the kitchen. The ones who do not form a polite ring of chairs near the food, and the mother-in-law's mother sits alone with a cup of tea and a fixed smile. Nobody is being rude. There is simply nothing for a stranger to do but keep finding things to say, and two hours is a long time to do that with a woman you met at the door.

Rung two: one small thing on arrival

One low-stakes task at the door, done in ninety seconds, never scored. Write a piece of advice for the first year. Write a wish for the baby and seal it to be read on a birthday. Guess the birth date on a calendar grid.

Good at: the first ten minutes, the most awkward stretch of any shower. It hands strangers a topic too, because a pen is a conversation opener that requires no bravery.

Who it suits: almost every shower, at any size. This rung is close to free and it is the one people skip.

Where it falls down: it is over in two minutes. It solves the doorway, not the afternoon, and it collapses if the pens run out or nobody explains it. Station a confident person by the table rather than a laminated sign.

Rung three: everyone makes something

Each guest makes her own small thing, side by side, over an hour or so. Decorating cotton bodysuits with fabric pens. A flower table where everyone builds a posy to take home. Personalising a set of wooden blocks.

Good at: the seating problem, because a craft table sits people at right angles rather than face to face, and side by side is a far easier place to talk to a stranger. Everyone leaves with an object, and the room fills with a soft busy noise instead of the effortful hum of mingling.

Who it suits: wide age ranges, because no cultural knowledge is required. A grandmother and a twenty-two year old can both decorate a bodysuit with neither at a disadvantage.

Where it falls down: it needs a host. Someone buys the materials, sets the table, explains it, keeps it moving and finds glitter in the carpet a fortnight later, and that someone is usually you. Without guidance, half the room also decides theirs looks rubbish within ten minutes and quietly stops.

Rung four: one shared object

Everyone contributes to a single thing that goes home with her. A guestbook canvas each guest signs or paints a corner of. A quilt where each person decorates a square. A recipe box where everyone writes in the meal they would drop at her door in week two.

Good at: the display problem. Attention points at the object rather than at her, but the object is entirely about her, so she gets the warmth without the spotlight. It also produces the only shower keepsake that survives. Nobody keeps a photo of the nappy game. A canvas with nineteen signatures on it is still on the wall when the child is eleven.

Who it suits: big, wide guest lists. The larger the mix, the better it works, because everyone contributes at the level they are comfortable with. The confident cousin paints a whole flower. The great-grandmother writes her name in the corner in beautiful handwriting, and that corner is the bit everyone points at.

Where it falls down: co-ordination. One shared object means one queue, and a queue is where a party goes to die. It needs room for six people to work at once, or it becomes a clipboard passed around while everyone waits their turn.

Rung five: something hosted

The top of the ladder. Someone who knows nobody in the room stands up and runs the afternoon: a paint and sip session, a florist-led workshop, a cheese tasting, a photographer taking portraits of every pair there.

Good at: everything the lower rungs struggle with. A host absorbs the awkwardness, sets the pace, tells the quiet ones what happens next and takes the organising off you, so you get to attend the shower you planned. Involvement is total and still never a spotlight on her, because a hosted activity aims attention forward.

Who it suits: fifteen guests and up, and any shower where three separate families are meeting for the first time.

Where it falls down: it is the most expensive rung, it needs booking well ahead, and it takes over the afternoon. If she wants a slow morning tea with six people who love her, this is too much party. The other way it goes wrong is booking something high-energy for a woman at thirty-six weeks who would rather be horizontal. Ask her. She will tell you.

Where Paint Juicy fits, and who it is wrong for

We sit on rung five, and we can run rung four inside it. A host runs a three hour session, everything is supplied, everyone paints sitting down, and there is a singalong in the middle while layers dry. A group who would rather have one keepsake than nineteen canvases can do a shared guestbook piece that every guest signs or paints part of. The baby shower paint and sip page walks through it.

Two ways in. Under ten of you, book seats at a public session at $59 AUD a head across Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory, and everyone pays her own way. From ten up, go private and we come to you: $700 AUD flat for the first 10 guests, then $65 AUD per additional guest, minimum 10 paid seats. The private bookings page has the detail. Artwork comes from our catalogue and colours are tweaked to suit at no extra charge.

Bottomless sessions are $99 AUD a head and strictly 18+, and for a baby shower they are the wrong pick anyway, because the guest of honour is not drinking and a bottomless format makes that the loudest thing in the room. Most events are 18+ and some are 12+ with a paying guardian present at all times, which matters if her fourteen year old niece is coming.

Who we are wrong for. A shower of six over a long morning tea. A guest of honour who wants a quiet couple of hours on a couch, or who is at the point in pregnancy where three hours anywhere sounds like a threat. And any group who genuinely enjoys the traditional games, because there is nothing wrong with a room of women melting chocolate into a nappy and crying laughing about it. Book what your friend would choose, not what reads well.

Baby shower questions, answered

What do you do at a baby shower if nobody wants to play games?

Decide how involved you want guests to be, then choose to match. The options run from asking nothing at all, through one small task at the door, to everyone making something, to everyone contributing to one shared keepsake, to a hosted activity that someone else runs. Games are only one point on that scale and they are not the busiest one.

Are baby shower games necessary?

No. They exist to solve a real problem, which is a room of people who do not all know each other and have nothing to do. Anything else that gives guests a job solves the same problem without asking anyone to guess the size of a woman's stomach.

How many guests is too many for a baby shower with no activity?

Around twelve. Below that, a room can hold one loose conversation and food and chairs are enough. Above it, the room reliably splits into the people who already know each other and the people who do not, and the guests who came alone end up stranded politely near the food.

What is a good baby shower activity for a mixed group of ages?

One shared object everybody adds to, like a guestbook canvas each guest signs or paints part of. It needs no cultural knowledge, so a grandmother and a twenty-something are on equal footing, everyone contributes at their own comfort level, and it goes on the nursery wall afterwards.

When should you open the gifts at a baby shower?

While something else is happening, or at home afterwards. Opening presents one at a time in front of a silent semicircle turns the guest of honour into a performer and loses the back half of the room by the ninth parcel. If you are opening them at home, say so when guests arrive.

Can you do a paint and sip at a baby shower?

Yes, and it works sitting down for the full three hours, which matters late in a pregnancy. Under 10 guests, book seats at a public session at $59 AUD a head. From 10 up, a private booking is $700 AUD flat for the first 10 guests, then $65 AUD per additional guest, minimum 10 paid seats, and we come to you.

Close the tab with the printable games in it. Work out how much you want to ask of nineteen women in a lounge room, pick the rung, and let your friend spend her own shower in a comfortable chair being talked to rather than looked at.

Trent & James