Oversized yard games for your outdoor gathering

by Patty Templeton

The beer pyramid stands tall. You’ve chopped 10 pounds of carrots, peppers, and other veg-o-noms. The caramelized French onion dip and wavy chips tempt from the table. Desmond Dekker or Nicki Minaj or Dreamcar or whoever slips outta your speakers. It’s a breezy, blue-sky day and the guests are walking into your yard party.

Problem. There’s only one you. You can’t be a grillmaster, working them goods that’ve been marinating for eons AND entertain friends. Yeah, yeah, friends can get hotsy-totsy tipsy under the summer sun, but what else? Give the people something more than PBR. Let them have games. Not just any games, ENORMOUS YARD GAMES!

Gianormo JengaAdd some DANGER to your wiener roast. Giant-ass Jenga is made of oversized wood blocks, each heavy as a bucket-o-blood, which coincidentally, is what your guests will expel if caught under these tumbling blocks.

The game usually begins at two-and-half feet tall, but as you tug, toil over, and stack blocks, it can reach five feet high. Start the game on a table, not the ground and that wood tower’s gonna redwood the F over you. When it falls, there’ll be a clatter-damn-smash, so play where you don’t care about the flooring or grass.

You can get a name-brand edition on Amazon, but if you want a specialized or huge(r) version, we suggest hitting up Home Depot to cut your own two-by-fours or Etsy. Search for “giant Jenga.”

Big hands, big fightAin’t much more ’Murica than having a bout of friendly fisticuffs at your yard party. Amp it up by using colossal, inflatable boxing gloves. Chalk a square on the driveway or rope off a backyard battleground, inflate your gloves, and get to the slugfest.

Unless you’re the Emperor of All Crafts, you’re gonna need to actually purchase these from a store. If you go “small-big” they’ll cost you about seven bucks. The enormous inflatable boxing gloves run you about $15. Don’t expect more than one drunk-use outta ’em.

It’s surprisingly soothing to hit your friends in the face with oversized, squishy fists. DGO recommends the big-big gloves.

M-effin bubble partyDGO knows a dude who went to Germany in the ’90s who made his living via street performance. The fantastic weirdo roller-skated for tourists while creating enormous bubbles with soap-dripping hula hoops. Bring Berlin to your backyard.

You can make a biggin’ bubble maker with two wooden sticks and a cord, but hey, if you ain’t crafty, the aforementioned hula hoop trick with a kiddie pool fulla soapy water works, too. As does spending 10 bucks after searching the interwebs for “big bubble maker.”

Wood dice are niceDGO has a thing for chuckin’ chubby cubes. Technically, these fatty woods are “dice” and technically it is Yard-zee that we’re playing. But think of our chubs however you wanna. Just think big.

Yard-zee is exactly like Yahtzee except you play on your lawn and the dice used could splatter and ’splode a bunny if it bounced through the backyard.

Your best bet on this one is Etsy. Search for “yardzee” to get the most search results. You’ll be in the $40 to $70 range, depending on how many accoutrements you want – like a bucket and enormo-scorecards. And if you’re in Farmington, Target sells giant dice for $24.99 and various cans/baskets for under $10.

Let’s go bowlingEver had a dream where you were a bowling pin and about to be crushed by a max-speed ball? No? Um. Neither have we. We totally haven’t seen our insides become outsides in a nightmare jumbo bowling game.

You can bowl big without crushing the life out of your party guests. Inflatable yard bowling exists. Usually, there’s six PVC pins about three feet tall with a use-both-hands ball to wallop at ’em. You’ll spend about 30 bucks.

Depending on how rowdy your friends are, this game won’t last through the night. But shit-talking and strike-mocking until the inevitable blow-up is worth the greenbacks.

Tic tac huh?How long’s it possible for grown-ass adults to play tic tac toe? If you’re in the shade with suds in hand, a belly full of burger, and a yard-encompassing tic tac toe board, DGO has scientifically calculated that there’s at least an hour of fun in this.

Fun decreases if you spend too much money. There’s posh, mondo-sized tic tac toe out there that can cost you $90. Which is ridiculous. Spend more than 30 Etsy bucks on this and you’re wasting beer money.

Yard pong all night longHere’s what you need. A yard. Six freshie, non-rank trashcans. And lots of BALLS. OK, maybe just four balls. The $5 Walmart, kids section, biggie ones.

You already know how to play beer pong. Instead of pitching lil’ ping pong balls in Solo cups, you’re lobbing dodgeballs at dumpster buckets. The trick is to *not* haphazardly hit a friend in the nuts or nose with a rubber ball while attempting to catapult it into a can.

If you wanna go cheap on this, you can use paint buckets instead of bigass trashcans.

Dommies!DGO can attest that the best place to play dominoes is an open-air café with the ghost of Oscar Wilde. If you can’t arrange airfare and a literary séance to make that shit happen, next best is playing oversized dominoes with inebriated friends in your yard.

Once again, the crafting maniacs will love this one. Because you can make your own domino set. But, if you ain’t got the time or don’t want to think too hard about how many dots you’ve stenciled onto a woody, you can buy yard dominoes for $40 and up, preferably on Etsy, where you can get a customized set.

Inflatable t-rex 4evaBy now, if you haven’t seen the over-tall, blow-up t-rex costume, we will pause to allow you to google for “pole dancing t-rex” and “t-rex skateboarding.”

Seen and snarfed at the wonder of it? Now imagine a t-rex battle royale in your backyard. It ain’t gonna be cheap. Inflatable t-rex costumes are about $55. BUT COME ON! A sweaty t-rex wrestle pit with the crowd chanting, “Two men enter, one man leave?”

#WorthIt #Memories #Thunderdome #BonusPointsIfYouBuildACageToHouseTheFight

— Patty TempletonDGO Staff Writer

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