5 Large Group Entertaining Ideas to Incorporate Into Any Event!
1. Create a reason for people to interact
Looking for ideas for large group activities?
The trick with entertaining a large group is to allow people to have the same small group intimacy even in the large group. To do this, you need to have a reason to get them talking to people. Otherwise there can be a tendency for people to just stick with the one or two people they know and not meet anyone new.
So how can you encourage people to have one on one conversations with strangers? They need a reason to talk to them. Permission to speak. And one of the best and easiest ways to do that is to run a mystery party game. It can be a traditional “murder mystery” or a mystery that isn’t a murder. Either way, they will need to speak to people in order to find out information.
And because most mystery party games are more on the silly rather than serious side, generally they will have a laugh with the people they meet. If they have gone to town creating their costume, this can also lead to conversation.
Hosting a mystery party game or an adult scavenger hunt can help get people interacting. But for all the major announcements, you should have a microphone on hand. We discuss more ideas for group activities below.
2. Make the food casual
What are some event entertainment ideas that work well with large groups?
The best way to cater for the group is to have either finger food or a serve-yourself buffet / smorgasbord. This gives people more freedom to move around and to meet other people than a formal sit-down affair.
But if you do have a sit-down dinner, let the suspects for the mystery party move around the room during the breaks between courses. This will let people ask them questions from their clue(s).
Another one of our large group entertaining ideas, if appropriate, is you can break the party up by having some music and encouraging people to dance. Sometimes, this can even go well with the script of the mystery. For example, with Merri Mysteries “Celebrity Celebrations” you can have one of the suspects – Elvis – lip sync or sing along karaoke style to one of Elvis’ hits.
3. Give everyone a way to dress up
What are some large group costume ideas?
You can either use a kit designed for a large group of 100 plus people with 100 characters each with their own dress suggestions, or you can use one for up to 30 guests. We offer many mystery games and party kits so there are plenty of large group costume ideas to decide on as a group. Often they have plenty of clues, so if you have more than 30 – the additional people can just dress to suit the theme rather than as a specific character. For example, for “Murder Of The Great Chef,” they can dress as apprentice chefs because it is set at a culinary school. Or as more 1940s gangster and dolls.
Or with “Hawaiian Lunacy”, they can just bring out their Hawaiian shirts.
If you know your guests won’t have time to put on a costume (e.g., after a formal event), you can just provide props for each character. For example, with “Mystery In The Library” you can have a bowl of oatmeal / porridge for Goldilocks to help her become her character.
4. Take a lot of photos at the beginning
When people start eating etc, they tend to wreck their costume, especially with messy large group activities. So take the photos as people are arriving. This is when they will look their best. Take individuals or couples or small groups or a mixture of all three.
Once everyone has arrived, take the big group photo. Then start the actual party game.
Later you can still take some impromptu photos, but if you do most of the photos early on, then you can relax and participate fully and enjoy the event yourself.
5. Also use it for fundraising event
If appropriate, you can do some fundraising for a special cause for your large group event. You could hold back a few clues and auction them off. Or even as you are in the event planning stage, you could make people pay a little extra for the honor of playing one of the suspects.
