I recently blew some seven year old minds. My seven year old wanted a Minecraft birthday party but anyone with a Minecraft obsessed child will know that the toys and merchandise are outrageously expensive – like mind-blowing-for-mums expensive. But I huntered high and low and came up with these Minecraft birthday party ideas that are just awesome (even if I do say so myself!)
So, I set out to create the party of the year on budget – and thought I’d share my affordable Minecraft birthday party ideas here.
Top tips for Minecraft party ideas on budget
- Start preparing early. It’s much, much cheaper to shop online but it can take weeks, if not months for party supplies to arrive from overseas – especially if you opt for free shipping.
- Keep an eye out at the local supermarket for ingredients on special. I got the Mars Bars for $0.80c each.
- Use “free downloadables” sites wherever possible
- Minecraft is all about creativity. Get creative – it’s totally on theme!
- We used disposable everything (biodegradable versions – pay a little more to ensure your party doesn’t last the ages) so cleaning up was literally picking up the edges of the table cloth and rolling up the mess.
- Use water jugs for drinks instead of individual cans or bottles. It’s $3 to make 10 litres of cordial….
- To minimise the spread of germs, any food small enough to require “digging into” should be individually portioned. Five of our guests had been off school with fevers and sneezes earlier in the week. Shot glasses are ideal for this. How your life has changed since becoming a parent… shot glasses everywhere and not a Slippery Nipple in sight!
Cool Minecraft party game ideas
I might not be a great cook but I do love creative party game ideas. My son is Minecraft mad and I’ve been lucky (cough) enough to sit through a million Minecraft games and countless YouTube videos. Knowing your subject matter helps. Lordy do I know my subject matter…. so, so well. My son is a bit obsessed with the Enderworld. This is a very particular part of Minecraft – beyond the newbie stuff, it’s all about defeating the Enderdragon – never heard of it? OH, YOU WILL.
The Crafting Table
Have you ever seen 30 kids at a birthday party in complete silence? There’s a first for everything. The crafting table was the stand out party game for Mr 7 and for me, it meant that the kids had something “feature” to put in their own party bags. I just added a few TNT and Lava lollies (SO cheap in bulk from a lolly warehouse or wholesaler – like $0.15c per piece boxed). Do this activity first as it gives glue and paint plenty of time to dry before your guests leave. You will need:
Some Minecraft colouring in pages – available free all over the internet.
- 3mm corflute sheets – available at most hardware stores for about $4 in the timber section
- A box cutter knife
- Craft glue suitable for gluing plastic and metal (depending on the adornments you choose)
- Glitter, stickers, paint and colouring pens (stickers available in bulk via Aliexpress)
- Patience
- Print as many black and white swords (or pick axes or characters) as you need for party guests.
- Stick them to the corflute and then cut out around the pixels. In my mind there was some kind of power saw that would do them all in one hit. Apparently not. My long suffering husband tells me each sword has 58 individual cuts. He spent a painstakingly long evening doing the cutting.
- On the day, simply set up your “crafting table” with everything they need to design their own Minecraft sword. We used little foam craft stickers and stick on gems to avoid too many glue mishaps. These are not TOO expensive in Australian dollar shops and craft supply stores but like all things disposable, they’re cheaper on Aliexpress. Note that Aliexpress takes FOREVER to deliver so order well in advance.
Minecraft mining party game ideas
We had two mining games. One for the big 7 year olds and one for the toddlers and littlies. Both were MASSIVE hits and can be done on tiny budgets.
Mining cloud dough
I had planned to create a cloud dough spectacular for the little kid mining game but I happened to be at a dollar store that was clearing kinetic sand for $0.50c so I just grabbed that. Cloud dough however, is non-toxic, easy and cheap to make! Get the ingredients, mix them together until they cling and bam, you’re done!
- 6 kgs of plain flour
- 4.5 cups of baby oil
- Minecraft coloured food dye
I simply hid little toys inside the sand and the little ones had to dig them out. They were mining for treasure (like faux emerald rings – $3 for 16 at a party shop) and I bought a 50 pack of Minecraft characters and faux Lego pieces for a few dollars to use in this game and for decorations. Once the mining was all done and dusted, the little sisters and brothers had a play table that kept them occupied for the rest of the party (not to mention some of the mothers – ooooh it’s so squishy).
Minecraft treasure hunt and mining game
This is a mining game for bigger kids that require they follow instructions and use safety precautions. It is however not as dangerous as it may sound! This one took some work and was probably the most expensive game to set up. It was a MASSIVE hit. You will need:
- Polished rocks or fish tank pebbles (available from most dollar stores)
- 1 large block of non-toxic, air drying clay ($13 from art supply stores)
- Welder’s chippers – these are the tools that welders use to scrape drops of molten metal off. Co-incidently, they look exactly like Minecraft pickaxes and are $5.99 from hardware stores.
- Rubber mallets – $5 from hardware stores
- Pool googles or safety goggles – three pack $8 from major department stores
- Bucket of soapy water with toothbrushes in it
Steps to play the game
- Divide the clay into “Minecraft style blocks” – or if you’re like me, meh, close enough style blocks. Cut or poke half way through each block and insert a “gem” – a polished rock or fish tank pebble. Mold the clay back into a solid shape. Stick a few smaller pebbles to the outside to give it that “Minecraft block appearance”.
- On the day, draw a great big quadrant on your driveway. Make it large enough that four kids can be “mining” with plenty of personal space around them. Place a pickaxe (chipper) or mallet in each square. Place a pair of safety googles (or pool googles) in each square.
- Hide your mining blocks all over the yard – don’t make them too easy to find or you’ll have too many kids lining up to mine at once. Make the little ghasts work for it. Instruct them to “go fossicking” for mining blocks. When they find one, return to the quadrant to mine the block. Once done, use the bucket and tooth brushes to clean off the gems and then go looking for more. As an added bonus, these gems also fill out a party bag quite nicely!
- We also had grandma and grandpa on hand to look over the polished rocks with the kids and tell them a bit about each rock. Grandma and grandpa are big fans of science so were invaluable in this game. The kids were able to understand that they had found “real treasure”.
- We ordered a lapis lazuli bracelet ($4 for 24 individual rocks) and a box of polished quartz and other pretty, shiny stones ($4 for 16 individual rocks) from Aliexpress. Obsidian, while a Minecraft favourite, is not suited to this game unless you order solid blocks. The smaller pieces will shatter when hit with the pickaxe. Plastic is a also perfectly acceptable.
NOTE: The clay will claim to dry hard in 48 hours. This is a big fat lie. Do it at least a week in advance of the party. Note that baking them dry in the oven is a terrible idea for several reasons. Not only will your oven stink, not only do you risk melting plastic in your oven but even the tiniest air bubble in clay makes for a spectacular, oven door shattering explosion. If your clay isn’t “rock hard” don’t worry – it means that it won’t “shatter” on the day, which means zero flying fragments. Ours was still very damp and cracked open instead of shattering. Perfect.
Minecraft party food ideas
OK so there are a million Minecraft birthday party food ideas on the internet. The beautiful thing is, that for people like me who can’t/won’t cook, they’re all super easy to make! Now, it’s important to note here that there is Vanilla Minecraft and Minecraft Mods. Vanilla Minecraft food is kind of limiting for a mother who won’t cook, but Minecraft Food Mods opens up a world of easy peasy food options. Shout out to DanTDM, the YouTube Minecraft expert for opening my eyes to food mods (and for being kind of cute!)
For the most part, party food is party food and the lollies and cakes and other classic party foods were purchased retail. I am not going to spend my whole life home making gummy bears to save $3 at the supermarket. The stand out wow recipes however were mostly done by my mum, the real cook in our family. Her recipes were AMAZING and very Minecrafty! I also used little shot glasses to individually package most of the lollies. This is because kids are gross. Like really gross. I didn’t want grotty hands diving into bowls over and over. If it was small enough to need digging through, it got its own individual portion cup.
Note that if you don’t believe in giving kids food colouring, start scrolling; this section isn’t for you! We used the “natural food colouring” options which at times reduced the wow factor of the results.
Mars Bar Slice “Grass Blocks”
Mars Bar Slice is basically chocolate crackles 2.0. It can be done in a Thermomix if you’re that way inclined (I had to borrow a blender for this party so no Thermie here)
Slice:
- 4 cups of rice bubbles
- 4 Mars bars cut into little pieces
- 100 grams of butter
Icing:
- 3 cups icing sugar
- 80 grams soft butter
- 1.5 tablespoons milk
- 1 cup shredded coconut
- green food dye
Method:
- Slice: Melt butter, add Mars bars, stir through rice bubbles, press into pan. Seriously, even I can make these.
- Icing: Combine butter, sugar, food dye and milk and stir like mad until it’s smooth. Top the slice.
- Stir a little food colouring into coconut and sprinkle over slice until you get “grass effect”.
Coal cookies
Turns out the rest of the world makes coal cookies as part of their Christmas festivities. Who knew? There are a million recipes out there. Again, who knew? You can use regular chocolate cookies but Oreos are really dark brown and give a very “black coal” appearance.
Ingredients:
- 2 large packs of Oreo Cookies (with the cream scraped out)
- 80 grams butter
- I large bag marshmallows
Method:
- Crush Oreos into a lumpy powder
- Melt butter
- Melt marshmallows
- Add Oreo crumbs until it’s a sticky, lumpy mess (this is my kind of cooking)
- Place in an oiled pan at room temperature to set
- Once set, cut into squares and “pinch” into coal shape
- Put in fridge to set properly
Minecraft Lava Cups
- 3 x packs of red jelly mix
- 300 grams of yellow and orange gummy bears or jelly beans
Method:
- Make jelly as per instructions on box – only with 1 cup less water. This makes the jelly a bit tougher.
- Allow to cool at room temperature for half an hour.
- Chop your lollies, put in little cups and then pour mix over the top.
- Allow to set for at least 3 hours
Minecraft Decorations
Free Printables
- I decorated the table with the little figurines and free downloadable tent cards available here. These make little imaginations stretch a long way – what was once a grape – totally not suitable as party food, is now a slime ball and a must have snack for any guest.
- I used textcraft.net to create Minecraft font to label all the different games and I stuck it to left over corflute and made little signs.
- Then I used a picture of the Minecraft Enderdragon and Text Craft to make my own (little bit shoddy but the kids loved them) invitations. I used Photoshop but you can use Picmonkey or other free online image editor.
- We enlisted our existing Minecraft toys to decorate the table and entry way.
- I bought Minecraft balloons from Aliexpress. They were $7 for a quantity described by Grace and Adelaide our friendly neighbourhood party helpers as “OH MY GOODNESS, do you want allllllllllllll of these blown up?”
- Creeper party bags could easily be hand made with some black pen and cheap and cheerful locally sourced green party bags.
- Besides that we just used streamers and lime green trims.
The ultimate Enderdragon cake
I did splurge on one thing… the cake. You see, I’m not a baker in any sense of the word, and I thought it best to pay a pro to make the show stopper cake! I have a little thing for very cool party cakes! I used Caked in Fondant to make this stunner cake.
For mothers with any baking and decorating talent at all though, Minecraft is all about the square blocks. So making an awesome cake at home doesn’t need much talent. Pinterest is choc-a-block (literally) with Minecraft cake ideas. Sadly, anything I attempted to make would inevitably look like a “Pinterest Nailed It” photo – so I outsourced this puppy!
Besides the cake, this was the ultimate budget Minecraft birthday party. We made a spectacle on a fair budget. The most fun? Looking through tons of Minecraft birthday party ideas online and then coming up with my own cool stuff to do for my young man’s 7th birthday party!
We love a themed party! Here are more themed party ideas:
- Pool party ideas in Brisbane
- Dinosaur themed party ideas
- Harry Potter themed party ideas
- Frozen Party ideas
- Minion party ideas
- Peppa Pig party ideas
- Slumber party ideas
- Minecraft party ideas
- How to throw a Christmas street party
- How to host a Halloween street party
