Guess the pieces in the jar
I prepared a huge pickle jar full of cannons,
barrels, and treasure chests. It was duct taped shut, and was a
"guess the number of pieces inside" game. Of course, guesses were
written down on a grid-marked sheet of paper, with a great prize going
to the one who came closest, and 2 smaller prizes for those who
happened to have their guesses next to the winner's guess. This way there is both a skill and a random element to winning.
Lego Bingo You use baseplates as a bingo board then assemble sets of 25 different pieces. That takes a long time, figuring out which pieces for each set. Generally we used 1 wall segment on each board, of different styles, one arch, one tree, one or two minifigs etc. You want to have mostly common pieces, and a few pieces that are only on 1 or 2 boards so you don't get too many bingos at once. Also be very very sure you have a duplicate of every piece used in your master set from which you draw the pieces. You let each player arrange the pieces on the board, 5 rows, 5 columns. The caller then draws out one piece from the master set and the players can use round 1x1 pips to mark the pieces. You go until someone calls LegoBingo then they check their bingo against the master set, and we had tons of polybag sets as prizes (thanks to John Sorrell). The winner then became the caller, so in addition to playing we got the amusement of seeing how each person names specific pieces like "1x6x2 yellow arch" or "flat blue windshield" etc. Pleasantly, I found a baseplate fits perfectly in the gallon size ziploc bags so we were able to assemble the board and pieces and put one player setup in one ziploc. We did up about 8 or 9 setups like that. I used the pink bucket from set 345 for the master set. It made clean up easy.
Creative Building Kits were pre-prepared for each participant. I had assembled random odd bits of pieces, and a very strange minifig in ziplocs. Each kit had some basic bricks, mostly the same elements, a wacky mixed up minifig composed of several different genres, and some individual pieces to ensure variety. The goal was to build (in 15 minutes) some scenario or contraption. There was a prize for best use of a BURP, and one for stability. There was also then one last prize for the best storyline or description of said creation.
Blindfolded Building Contest
Another building contest was the blindfolded one. Each player was
given 5 full minutes to memorize directions to the set #6020, Magic
Shop. That set was chosen because it is basically simple, has limited
pieces, and no color duplications of the same type bricks. Again, 3
categories were used for judging. One prize went to the first to
build it correctly, one went to the most amusing failure to build it
correctly, and to whoever
bungled the job as badly as could be done,
there is a
booby prize of some DUPLO set to practice on until the next building contest. The
children competed separately from the adults, and only one of them
peeked past the blindfold (smile). It was absolutely hilarious watching everyone fumble with the pieces. I recommend this one highly as a party game. That particular set is cheap, easy to find, and I let everyone keep the set they opened.
Memory Game
One last game we played was a memory game, with a platter full of various Lego
pieces, figs, trees, flowers, etc. We looked at it for several
minutes, then it was covered up, and we each wrote down as many things
as we could remember. The person with the most things remembered won
a prize.