Minecraft Birthday Party!

My newly 7-year-old really needed a win. So when he asked for a minecraft birthday party to celebrate his turning 7, I knew I had to make it memorable. So I have learned more than I care to know about minecraft. Do you know how to get to the end? How to craft a bow and arrow? How to defeat a blaze? I do!

With the help of chatgpt, firm direction from the 7-year-old, and some helpful inspiration from HERE the party was a huge success! 

Most importantly, my son had a blast. He has told me several times since: "Thank you so much for the party . . . it was made with so much love. I loved it." <3<3<3 

I thought I would share some of the experience for inspiration! I unfortunately don't have step-by-step instructions but will describe how things were made at the bottom of this post! 

We only invited a small group of friends for my sanity - but it was still mahem. I also grossly overestimated the focus of five 7-year-old boys, as I ended up having to summerize the instruction cards and move them through the activities. But they were very enthusiastic, and seemed engaged the entire time. I think the cards would have worked better with slightly older kids and allowed them to do the activites a bit more independently. 

The party was scheduled for 2:30 PM, which I firmly believe is the absolute perfect time for kid parties. It's not ambiguous - no one expects a meal between 2:30 and 5:30! So as a host, I'm only responsible for snacks and cake. I love this time as a guest too, becuase it gives me enough time to feed my kids a healthy lunch that I know they will eat and I know they have the energy they need to participate in the party. If a party includes a meal, my kids may or may not eat enough or will just eat junk -- and later are often hangry. 

I love making themed cakes, but I don't do themed treats, at least not at this age. I know my kid and he doesn't need a pintrest ready snack spread. He just wants snacks he likes to eat, and doesn't care how it looks. Everything I did for this party was exclusively for the kids, I'm really just too lazy to make it fancy for the adults too!

Photos cropped to avoid showing kids faces. 

Mission 1/Opening activity:

I like to have a chill creative activity available while kids arrive that they can do for the first half hour. It has to be something fun and engaging, but not so fun that kids feel like they 'missed out' if they arrive near the end of the activity. For this party, I decided to have them build with 1 inch magnetic minecraft blocks. Most of the things purchased for this party were gifts that my son got for his birthday including these blocks, the bow and arrow, and some minecraft swords. He unwrapped them on his actual birthday and knew we would be using them for the party. 

As you read below, the main quest for the party was to find 9 ingredients to 'craft' (using the crafting table) the mystery item (spoiler: it was the cake!). I personally wanted the ingredients to be the actually ingredients needed to make a minecraft cake, but was overruled by the 7-year-old who chose random items to make the cake. Ah well. 

Opening instruction cards:

Opening activity: Rebuild the village!

We gave them the crafting book (below), blow up minecraft swords for each kid (which they loved but did increase the chaos by a order of magnitude), a map (which wasn't used since it rained and I had to move things around and ended up directing them), and the crafting table: 

Crafting table (currently with gunpowder and sand on it to make TNT)

Mission 2: Craft bow and arrows using string, sticks and flint hidden in the yard. Once they put it correctly on the crafting table, I handed them the bow and arrow and the started shooting the wither and creeper. 

Once they each had a few turns, I'll be honest, things got away from me. While waiting their turn, they started sparing with each other with the blow up swords, which was fine. After archery was done, they attacked the Creeper/Wither until they were completely destroyed. It felt a bit like lord of the flies, but no one got hurt, and they had a lot of fun. My husband was glad because he knew I would have kept those bulky creatures forever otherwise and he doesn't want to store them. 

Mission 3: I got control of the situation with the help of another parent, and they found the gunpowder (in the creeper) and sand blocks (in the yard) and crafted the TNT block for a mentos and coke experiment. I think I got bottles of coke at a dollar store (enough for each kid to have a turn + 1), a lot of mentos, and the Steve Spangler Geyser tube. They had fun using the different lids and running away. I definitely accidently set it off once while I was putting the top onto the coke and we all ran away laughing! The experiment didn't work as well as usual since it was pretty wet outside, but everyone had fun.

Mission 4: Mining! Collecting blocks in a 'mine' (which contained some favors - links provided and other materials). The kids went down our outside stairwell and collected flint and steal (printed and glued onto foam), gold ingots, diamond ore (boxes looking like diamond ore that contained a 'diamond'), and a block of obsidian. 

"Mining"

Door to the basement became the nether portal that opened by adding the final obsiden block and each kid banging flint and steel together.

Mission 5: This part was a bit hectic, so I didn't get a good photo. In the 'nether', there were plastic lava table clothes taped across the floor and a red nightlight making everything look dim. On the other side, my brother was holding the blaze hanging on a stick. It had blaze rods (just printed rectangles) hanging from it but I didn't get a chance to take a picture.  I got some of those fake snowballs from my buynothing group and they all had fun throwing them at my brother -- eventually getting them into the blaze. 

The Blaze: 

Mission 6: I didn't get a photo of this, but they used foam squares to make a train to get across the lava. It worked ok, not a highlight but was fine - I could have nixed this activity. Then they all searched the basement for the hidden chest filled with netherite scraps (tin foil).

Mission 7: Trading a piglin - gold for ender pearls (printed on paper and laminated) - apparently this is something piglins provide. They kept one block of gold each and traded the extra to the piglin. My brother agreed to be the piglin and hid in our understairs nook -- after seeing what had happened to the creeper/wither, he was a bit apprehensive of this role but he was unscathed 😛

My kids had fun playing with the piglin mask and blaze after the party!

Mission 8: Crafting a netherite sword from their diamond swords and netherite scraps. I had planned to have them craft the diamond swords using the diamonds they mined but just nixed that last minute and had them use the blow up diamond swords they all already had.

Mission 9: 'Crafting' eyes of ender from ender pearls and blaze rods. One of the eyes of ender was tied to a string that led to the end portal (because if you throw an eye of ender it will help you locate the end portal-- or so I understand). They then had to work together to place the rest of the eyes of ender on the portal. Once they did that, I pulled a green piece of tissue paper off the opening to 'activate' the portal and reveal the black tissue paper entrance, which they broke through and then one at a time crawled through the 'portal' leading to our carport.... and the ender dragon. The kids had a lot of fun crawling through the portal!

Mission 10: Fighting the Ender Dragon Pinyata using the netherite sword. I had wanted to fill the dragon with 'XP' - boxes with prizes in them (ring pops, minecraft pez, and some small metal minecraft figurines), but the boxes were too big so I ended up putting candy in the pinyata and just passing out the XP at the end. Pro-tip: always have a bag of spare candy to throw on the ground in front of kids while the pinyata is breaking. This way you can spread the kids out more so they don't knock into each other, and you can make sure all kids have a fair shot at getting candy. 

Fighting the ender dragon: 

'XP' goodie boxes: 

Mission 11: Using the special golden items they had collected throughout to craft a minecraft cake. There were items hidden throughout the game with the gold sticker on it that they collected.  At this point they had lost several of the items, haha, but we just moved on.

Finally - cake! - half chocolate and half vanilla with vanilla buttercream, covered with 336 squares of chocolate. I used a cutter to cut 3/4 inch squares out of melted sheets of various candy melts -- and used starbursts for the red. It took a long time, I'm not going to lie. 

Making of the cake: 

Comments on construction: The cardboard characters turned out to not be that difficult becasue everything is made of squares! Seriously, I think anyone could make these!

Everything was made of appropriatelly sized boxes, layers of tissue paper, and lots of glue. I also got a few packs of tissue paper squares (1 inch) for decorations (ex. creeper face, crafting table, eyes of the dragon). The wither, piglin, and the blaze faces were printed on regular printer paper and glued on. I found the image I wanted, then used https://rasterbator.net/ to allow me to print the image to the correct size -- on multiple sheets if necessary. The nether portal, end portal, TNT, and the 4 inch x 4 inch blocks (diamond, obsidian, and 'XP' boxes) were also printed and glued on. 

The end dragon pinyata was a fun challenge - the head was a upside down shoe box and the mouth was the lid of the shoebox. The wings were constructed of cardboard and tissue paper. And the whole thing was held together with wire, and foam tubing. It was pretty heavy! 

I hope this helps inspire future minecraft parties! It was super fun and, most importantly, the kids had an absolute blast!