Let’s go back to January. My roommates and I had a winter party planning pow-wow with the singular goal of uncovering the greatest theme of all time. We started by Googling “college party themes” which yielded a whole bunch of cliche ideas and more than a few questionable banner ads. Some of the ideas included:
- Toga party – fun but a little cold for a -20º January evening in Minnesota
- Foam party – totally awesome, but I’m no expert in foam propagation… other than the time liquid dish soap ended up in our dishwasher. Hey, there’s an idea!
- H.A.M. party – a tribute to Watch The Throne and the good sirs Kanye and Jay-Z. This idea was great, but taken.
- Anything but a cup party – no cups allowed. Beverages must be kept in flower vases, coffee pots, measuring cups, or other containables. Again, taken.
Because the search left us with a bunch of ideas and no direction, we decided to retreat to the living room and take a mental break. Figuring out how many cubic feet of foam is required to fill a 800 sq. ft. basement is more math than us design folk typically encounter in a day.
Enter Scrabble Board
The only absolute truths in this world are that
- a) Photoshop will crash when you try to save
- and b) the best ideas come when you’re not expecting them
The latter is how the Scrabble theme was born. We forgot about our party-planning woes by playing an uplifting game of Scrabble. That led to a discussion about the game of life, which lead to Bananagrams, which led to life-size letters, which led to our theme. It was smooth scrabbling from there on out.
The preparations for the party were relatively simple. We printed over 160 individual scrabble pieces for our guests – all in the proper proportions. That means 8 A’s per 2 Q’s. The letters were then displayed on a glowing blacklight-lit wall for the full effect. Guests could get creative and choose the letter that best reflected their inner essence (which generally equated to the first letter of their name).
The beauty of the Scrabble theme is that it’s super simple, yet highly extensible – two traits of most things awesome. You can keep score, play for fun, try to spell the longest word ever, or just search for fellow consonants. The possibilities are endless.
Let me play!
If you’re looking for an awesome theme for your next event, the Scrabble theme is yours for the taking. I uploaded the letters ready-to-print on 8.5″ x 11″ paper in the correct proportions, so you’re all set. If you come up with a new twist definitely post it below and we can get a big wall ‘o inspiration going on. Happy spelling!
DOWNLOAD THE HUMAN SCRABBLE PIECES (2.5mb)
Hi,
I just found these and am SO excited because I’m going to be using them for a mixer with 240 people tomorrow! Thanks for creating the pieces!!
Yes! I’m so happy you were able to use them. Have fun! Let’s start a scrabble party movement.
Scrabble is probably the most classic word board game and loved by many. Essentially, it’s a crossword style word game, each player has to form words from tiles, which have individual letters printed on a board marked by a grid.