For one of our annual Harry Potter parties, we had a blast hosting a “Headless Hunt” tournament inspired by Nearly Headless Nick’s ambition to join the exclusive group of beheaded ghosts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets! But rather than using severed heads, we used balloons to play several quick carnival style games!

During our annual Harry Potter party, we sort our guests into the four Hogwarts houses (a fun way to sort in this post here!) and then the house teams compete in a series of challenges throughout the day, one challenge for each of the 7 books. Our Headless Hunt tournament was the challenge for the second book.

(Read more about how we set up our annual epic day-long Harry Potter party in this post!)

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To get started, each guest was given a balloon in their house color and we gave everyone the chance to draw a face on their balloon or “head.” Then we were ready for the games…

#1 – Don’t let the balloon drop!

For this activity, each participant had their balloon and a fly swatter. The goal was to keep your balloon in the air only using your fly swatter (no limbs!). Once your balloon hits the ground you are out! You are trying to be the last balloon in the air while also trying to knock your opponents’ balloons out. The last person with their balloon in the air earns points for their house!

Some important rules we had for our game:

• You can only touch balloons with your fly swatter, no hands or feet! This goes for knocking your opponents’ balloons out too.
• You must stay within pre-set boundaries! (To make it more challenging if participants are too spread out, make the boundaries smaller as the game goes on.)
• You can help your teammates as long as your balloon is still in play but once your balloon drops, you are out and must move to the sidelines.
• For a fun twist, you could add more balloons of each color as the game goes on!

#2 – Balloon Waddle Relay

This next one is a relay race with a catch – you have to run/waddle with your balloon between your legs! Have teams line up at the starting line and run across the yard and back. Once the first runner/waddler gets back the next one will go until every member of the team goes – all while keeping their balloon between their legs. The first house to finish wins house points!

#3 – Balloon Darts

In this activity, players take turns throwing darts at a board of balloons trying to pop all the other house’s colors! We took turns alternating through all the players and teams until each player had had their turns (How many turns each team/player gets may depend on how many people you have). We awarded points at the end based on how many of each color was still on the board – the most balloons remaining earned the most points.

Balloon Darts takes some prep work to set up. We used two old bulletin boards and pinned 10 balloons of each color to them. To pin the balloons, we used push pins, making sure to pin on the end where they wouldn’t lose air. Be sure to mix them up randomly by color to make it more challenging to avoid your own house!

Those are the three Headless Hunt challenges we planned for our party but another idea that might be fun is a water balloon toss! What other balloon games could you play for a Headless Hunt?

We paired our Headless Hunt with a “Death Day” themed snack break to celebrate Nearly Headless Nick’s 500^th Death day! Treats included “moldy” cheese and crackers (thanks to some mold-printed baggies similar to these on Amazon), a gummy worm jello cake (with “moldy” cool whip thanks to black food coloring!) and “blood” to drink from IV bags –you can put whatever red drink you like into these drinkable fake IV bags! (Yes I know ghosts don’t drink blood but we took some creative liberties!)

And that wraps up our Headless Hunt competition at our annual Harry Potter party!

Check out these posts for some more great ideas for your Harry Potter party…

• How to play Boggart Pictionary
• Sort your guests into houses by playing this Sorting Hat Song Left-Right Game
• Make Mandrake Dirt Pudding for your Sorting Ceremony

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