DIY Backyard Quidditch

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Bring the magic of Quidditch to your yard with these easy tips!

One of the activities we were really looking forward to at our Harry Potter birthday party was playing Quidditch! The thought of trying to create a Quidditch field in our yard seemed a bit daunting though. So I did a lot of research into putting together a decent game. Luckily, now that Harry Potter has been around for 20 years, a lot of people have thrown this party before me! I ran into one incredible idea for creating the Quidditch hoops which was not only brilliant but incredibly inexpensive as well. Easy and cheap is always a win!

Gathering all of the other supplies to play the game was pretty easy as well. We only changed the rules a little bit, but the kids really seemed to enjoy it!

Quidditch Supplies:
Brooms
2 Bludgers
1 Quaffle
1 Golden Snitch
Rules
Quidditch Hoops

In wizard Quidditch you need 1 Keeper, 1 Seeker, 3Chasers, and 2 Beaters.

We altered that by 1 player, having only 1 Beater per team just to make it a little less crazy with all the ball throwing.

You can see above that our “Bludgers” are giant bouncy balls. The main reason for this is that they are being thrown by the Beaters at all of the other players. They are big balls, but fairly lightweight so their impact isn’t likely to hurt anyone.

The Quaffle is a slightly deflated kickball. Again, not super hard, but enough for the kids to toss around to each other and try to get into the hoop.

The Golden Snitch that we used for the game was a golf ball that I spray painted gold.

I wanted to get creative with the brooms but just was not finding anything I thought would work well. These were mostly 8-11 year olds at the party so I didn’t want giant brooms they would end up tripping over. I finally opted on these blow up balloons I found at Oriental Trading. They are pretty small (just 2 ft long), but actually perfect for our game of Quidditch. All of the players had to “ride” their broom while playing or their moves would be disqualified.

You can download my copy of the rules here if you like. Again, we did alter the rules by one player to make it less chaotic. It also made it so that all of our players were able to have brooms since the set came with 12.

The Quidditch hoops are sheer genius! I found the idea of how to make them here. We tried it and it worked SO well!!! I lucked out and found hula hoops on sale somewhere since it was the end of summer. And the PVC pipe and piece that were used weren’t expensive at all. We glued the ends of the hula hoops into the PVC piece. Then it was just a matter of hammering the pipe into the ground and attaching the hoops to the top. They held up great! In fact, we left them up in our yard for several weeks after the party and they never budged or leaned or anything.

The kids had such a good time with this game! I can see why people have actually created real Quidditch tournaments now.

And you can see how small the brooms were in this photo! Though they worked awesome for the game.

We hid a Golden Snitch prior to the party starting and had the Seekers from each team try to find it during the game. Whomever found it won the game for their team!

What do you think? Would you tackle a Quidditch match in your yard?

 

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Don’t miss these other Harry Potter Birthday Party posts!