Harry Potter, Wizard World, + Magic Party Ideas, Games, Food, And More (Part 3)

WIZARDING PARTY SERIES: A HUNT FOR HORCRUXES

Welcome to Part 3 of our Wizarding Party Series (because yes, this theme was a constant for a very long time, birthday after birthday 🙂 ).  While we did pull some of the menu ideas from our previous party, we varied the games completely.  For this party, we had an older group of kids who all read the Harry Potter books, so we focused on Book 6 and 7: the search for horcruxes!

Try out a few of these suggestions below and let us know how it goes and what you think!

DECOR

We had a Slytherin fan as our birthday kid, so we used a silver and green color scheme: black table cloths, silver plates, green napkins and silverware, and a few slytherin napkins, etc..  

By this time, we had also built up quite a collection of Harry Potter items: sorting hat, broomsticks, triwizard cups, broom pens, time turner necklaces, pigmy puffs, snowy white stuffed animals, etc..   So we had all those surrounding the party area. 

ARRIVAL

Most guests will trickle in a few minutes before or after the actual start time of the party.  To keep everyone in theme, have a few activities in an area of the party. 

For this party, we opted for a few easy to do activities.  We did purchase green and silver M&Ms and had those in a different jar sizes.  Guests had to guess how many M&Ms were in the jar and the closest person got to keep that jar. 

Also, because we had collected so many Harry Potter items, we had a bit of an easy scavenger hunt.   We had a table of “Can you find it sheets”. We asked guests to just write down where they found the item instead of grabbing it, so everyone could have a chance to find them.  

CRAFTS

We purchased some yarn so that our guests could make pom poms based on their House colors.  We used a different tutorial but this one works just as well (and seems a little easier): https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/learn-to-make-pom-pom-bunting 

FOOD & DRINKS

There are quite a few Harry Potter cookbooks out there, so if you’d like to follow some recipes, go ahead and grab some!   Otherwise, you can always ‘re-name’ some typical foods to make them sound more in tune with the wizard world.  We printed the labels on antique style paper to add to the decor. 

Note: we did repeat most of these menu items from our last Harry Potter / Wizard Party.  You can find links here to different games and activities:  Harry Potter / Wizard Parties

• Appetizers
  • Herbology Bites – we used a super simple recipe from justsweetandsimple.blogspot.com: Herbology Bites (justsweetandsimple.blogspot.com)
  • Hogs Head Cornish Balls – Cookbooks may give you some recipes from scratch but we used regular old meatballs and just added a nice little label 🙂 
  • Felix Felicis Spinach Dip – we cheated here too and just labeled regular spinach dip as “Felix Felicis Spinach Dip”
• Main
  • For this party, we actually order meat pies to change things up a bit.
• Desert
  • Cockroach clusters – store bought turtle chocolates
  • Moonstone cookies – dark brown chocolate cookies
  • Olivander’s Wands – big pretzel sticks 
  • Treacle Tarts – mini pecan or jam bites
  • Rock cakes – mini chocolate muffins
  • Cupcakes w/ toppers
  • Pensieve – silver bowl w/ blue jello
  • Golden Snitches – Ferrero Rocher truffles to fill the Triwizard Cup
• Drinks
  • Liquid Luck – Label any of your drinks “liquid luck”
  • Butterbeer – if you’re brave or have a sweet tooth, butterbeer recipes can be found all over the internet, but we found our guests didn’t like the sweetness. 

GAMES

Since we had an older crowd with kids who were familiar with the books and movies, we dove a bit more into the story of the horcruxes.  We told the kids that their goal was to find all horcruxes as a group. 

• The first horcrux that Harry finds is Tom Riddle’s Diary which Harry destroyed with a basilisk fang.  
  1. We hid DIY Journals around the party area with one that had a label as “Tom Riddle’s Diary” and one with a basilisk fang.  
  2. The kids who found the one with the labels won this round, but all kids got a journal (DIY Journals).  The kids can either open the journals and put them together or just add them to their bag.

• The second horcrux is Marvolo Gaunt’s Ring which Dumbledore destroyed with Gordric Gryffindor’s sword. The sword was found inside Gaunt’s house hidden among the weeds and bushes. .  
  1. If you have one of those large playhouses for dollhouses, you could use that as “Marvolo’s House”; however, we ended up just drawing an old, abandoned house on a poster board and putting that against a wall in the corner.  Around that area, we added green balloons and streamers with one lucky green balloon holding a plastic ring (Guant’s). 
  2. The kid who found the ring first got to be the one to pop the green balloon “‘piñatas” first.  Of course he or she had to find the Gryffindor sword first.  (The rest of the kids took turns as well, so we were sure to have a balloon for each kid with some extras hidden away.  The balloons were filled with candy and confetti, so it was quite a mess but very fun for them.  (We had extra rings – Gemstone Rings – for each child to pass out after this round). 

• The third horcrux is Syltherin’s Locket which is found in a dark cave and also destroyed by the Gryffindor sword.  
  1. For this horcrux, we used the largest package box we had and covered it in black plastic and black Halloween cloth. You can also put boxes together, just use a darker room, or throw a dark tablecloth over a table – whatever’s around that the kiddos can “crawl” through.  At the end of the ‘cave’, we had a punch board piñata alternative. We used the instructions from: Rainbow Punch Piñata (madewithhappy.com) though ours was all black to keep with the cave theme.  
  2. Inside ONE of the holes was a toy “locket” and a glow stick.  The rest contained just the mini glow sticks.  The kids got to keep their glow sticks but we also had necklaces for each child. 

• The fourth horcrux is Hufflepuff’s Cup which is found in a vault at Gringotts.  This one is also defeated by a basilisk fang. 
  1. We had toy coins and plastic gold trophies (Trophy Party Favors) all around but also re-used the circles from the punch piñata in the previous activity and added a coin image.  On the other side of one was an image of the Hufflepuff cup.  
  2. The kids had to sift through the play coins (Gold Coins (400ct)) and trophies and other plastic treasures (Amazon Favor Necklaces, rings, etc) to find the ‘coins’ with images of the Hufflepuff cup as well as the one with the basilisk fang.  The kids who did won this round but each kid also got some chocolate coins for their bag 

• The fifth horcrux is Ravenclaw’s Diadem.  This one is found in the room of requirement and destroyed by FiendFyre (magical fire). 
  1. This one was a bit of an obstacle course.  We ‘hid’ the Ravenclaw Diadem (Necklace) on the far end of one of the rooms in the house.  Then we set up the broomstick and a red plate at the entry.   We had red “flames” (red construction paper) on the floor where the kids couldn’t step.  
  2. Their objective was to get to the diadem without stepping on the “fire” and return the diadem to the red plate (FiendFyre).  For older kids, we also tossed balled up red tissue paper in the air while they were “flying” through the room on their broomstick.  If the tissue touched any part of them, they had to go back and try again. 

• The sixth horcrux is Nagin, Voldermort’s snake.  It is also defeated by Gryffindor’s sword. 
  1. We thought it might be a bit too graphic to see a snake destroyed by a sword (even though the snakes were just plastic), so we opted for tossing snakes (Snake Party Favors (36 pc)) onto a grey poster board with a sword drawn on it.  There were “levels” on this poster board with ‘points’ (similar to carnival games).  The farthest the snake was thrown, the more points a kid received. 
  2. There wasn’t really a winner for this one (unless you keep count of the # of points each kid got).  But, we did let them keep the snakes they picked out to toss. 

• The seventh horcrux is Voldermort himself.   We had a picture of Voldermort on a pull string piñata and let each kid take a turn.   We added a bit of fun and told the kids they had to yell out a dueling spell (Expelliarmus, Sectumsempra, Relashio, Petrificus Totalus, etc.) while pulling out their string. 

GOODIE BAGS

If you want to keep in theme when you’re guests leave, sprinkle in some wizard items for their goodie bag along with any of the regular candy or hand outs you want to give out. 

Since we had a Slytherin birthday kid, we used silver bags with green tissue.  We had also already passed out quite a bit during the game portion of the party, so we kept things pretty simple in the bag.  Rather than pass out Bertie Botts every flavor beans, we opted for individual mini packets of regular Jelly Bean Mini Packets, Harry Potter Bracelets, and clean versions of the Harry Potter Cupcake Toppers.