Building the quest around a decade
The inspirations step carries most of the weight on a milestone birthday quest. Give it the birth year, the town they grew up in, the band they refuse to apologise for and the job they had at twenty-two, and the tasks come back full of specifics rather than generic birthday wording.
Time travel is the natural theme, moving decade by decade from the birth year to now. A detective case works too, with the group investigating the guest of honour. Set the audience to friends or party, the difficulty to medium or hard, and around twelve tasks for a party that runs an evening.
- Theme: time travel through their decades, or a detective case with them as the subject
- Location: indoors at home or a booked room, or the yard for a summer fortieth
- Audience: friends or party, since the humour depends on remembering the same decade
- Difficulty: medium to hard, with trivia pitched at people who lived through it
- Task types: a trivia quiz on the decade, code and cipher, observation and a creative roast task
Nostalgia and roast ideas for a big birthday
The strongest tasks make guests remember or confess. Three stories about the birthday person where only one is true, a photograph from 1994 that has to be matched to the person in it, or a trivia round on the year they were born that nobody over forty gets right.
Keep the roast affectionate and let the guest of honour play rather than host. The host notes go to whoever organised the party, which means the person turning fifty can be dragged through their own history without knowing which cupboard the next card is in.
- One task per decade, starting at the birth year and finishing at the present
- Two truths and a lie about the birthday person, verified by their oldest friend
- Number one songs from their teenage years, matched to the year they charted
- A cipher that decodes to their first car, or the nickname they thought had been forgotten
- Match old photographs to the guests who appear in them
- A creative finale where each table writes one prediction for the next decade
Scaling a milestone party hunt
Milestone parties bring together people from different parts of a life: school friends, work colleagues, family, neighbours. Mixed teams are the point, because the school friends know the answers about the nineties and the colleagues know the answers about the last five years, and neither can finish alone.
If the party is at a restaurant, keep the trail to one room and use table numbers as hiding places rather than a route through the building. Print a card set per table and put the poster where guests arrive, so people who turn up an hour late can still work out what is happening.
How it works
- Choose a theme, then indoor or outdoor location.
- Set the audience, difficulty and how many tasks you want.
- Generate the scenario, tasks and host answers, and read the free preview.
- Pay once, then print the tasks or read the clues aloud.
