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Zombie party decorations

Our active escape party: Zombies, chaos & Lord of the Flies

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How to entertain 9-year-old boys for 4 hours?

With a zombie-themed Active Escape Party — blending outdoor games, teamwork, and storytelling.

For about three weeks, my brain has been hijacked by Zombie party planning.

Nowadays, kids’ birthdays come with big expectations — and can sometimes feel like a competitive sport. I’m all for putting in effort to make an occasion memorable, but I’m less keen on it being about boatloads of presents, and I don’t have the budget for high-expense venues. So, as my son’s birthday approached, I started to consider what options I had for a 9-year-old’s party.

While I love escape rooms, my son has enough trouble sitting still at school — asking him and his friends to concentrate on traditional puzzles for his birthday just wasn’t going to work. At the same time, I wasn’t about to trust them with four hours of unstructured free play that might spiral into chaos.

Free play is a wonderful thing — but when you’re the adult responsible, especially in a second language you’re not fluent in, figuring out when to step in (and when not to) is a delicate balance.

So instead, I leaned into the chaos and spent three weeks planning our Zombie-themed Active Escape Party.

Did it go exactly as planned? No. Are we exhausted and slightly mentally bruised? Absolutely. But it was a resounding success.

There were moments that felt eerily like something from Lord of the Flies — chanting and battle cries around the campfire — but it was also fascinating to watch the boys self-regulate as a group. Exhausting, yes. Worth it? 100%.

What is an active escape party?

An Active Escape Party is kind of like an escape room, but outdoors and on the move. A blend of physical games, group challenges, and storytelling, with no locked rooms or puzzles that require too much sitting still.

I wanted something that mixed high-energy fun with some cooperation, light problem-solving, and imaginative play, without relying on tech or expensive venues.

Think: scavenger hunts, mini missions, mystery-solving, and physical challenges all tied together by a loose story (in this case: curing a zombie virus).

How it all came about

The whole thing was almost accidental. Last year, we invited 6 boys, but only 4 showed up. They spent 6 hours building pillow forts, flinging water balloons, shooting bows, and running wild on a DIY quad track my husband mowed into the long grass. It was gloriously chaotic.

Even during that chaos, the shrieking red-faced boys were still creating stories to propel the games forward and keep them engaging.  

This year, after attending a string of ‘contained-fun’ parties, we briefly looked into renting a play space or hiring a bouncy castle. But the prices? Let’s just say that made our decision easier.

So we gave our son a choice:

  • A big party with the whole class (21 kids)
  • Or a smaller party at home with a better present

He chose ‘small’ and zombie-themed — probably helped by the fact we’ve been reading The Last Kids on Earth series. Once I mentioned zombies, it was game on.

Planning the Zombie escape

I knew chaos was coming, but I wanted to channel it — not fight it. A few guiding principles helped:

  1. No killing zombies: Like in the Last kids on Earth books, zombies were once people, I did not want to promote violence. So the aim was to cure, not destroy.
  2. No winners or losers: Everyone works together toward a common goal — sequencing the zombie virus DNA to create a cure.
  3. Minimal waiting around: Group games where everyone could move, collect, or hunt.
  4. Alternate energy levels: Big games > focused task > big game > repeat.
  5. Know your audience: These are 9-year-old boys. Saturday. High sugar. Low attention span.

The structure (more or less)

We ran the party over 4 hours, loosely structured like this:

  • 1.5 hours of games (one every 10–15 minutes)
  • 0.5 hour food break
  • 1.5 hours of more games
  • 0.5 hour of free play (mostly fire poking and wrestling)

I created a mix-and-match set of zombie games, so we could pivot depending on mood, energy levels, or small acts of rebellion.

⚠️ I did way more prep than we actually used, but if you’d like to skip at least some of that and run your own version, I’ve made the storyline and game ideas available in a free PDF you can download.

2025-05-24_Zombie Party PlanDownload

What worked (and what we learned)

  • Hunting, finding, and smashing things = massive hit
  • Defined zones help keep the game sequence flowing and ‘herd’ the kids towards the campfire area
  • Let them self-regulate during free play — we stepped in only when absolutely necessary (and even then, just a quick nudge)
  • Mind your adult-to-kid ratio; we had two adults for 9 boys. There are plenty of guidelines on the internet, but in an informal setting, I would err on the side of caution.  

Was it perfect?

No.
Did I stress needlessly over details? Yes.
Did they notice the 30% that went “off-script”? Not at all.
Would I do it again? Sigh… yes. In fact…

Next year…..

We said “never again,” but I’m already plotting a DIY geocaching active escape for a smaller group. We’ll set up a route the day before, hide clues, and let the kids work their way to a final destination: a campfire with sausages before home time.

It’ll be away from the house and hopefully even more tiring as there is an actual route to complete. But I will also limit the numbers to 4-6 boys in total.

Good luck

If you decide to host your own, just don’t forget the snacks, firepit, or most importantly your mental resilience.

Tadpoles

First there were tadpoles, then there were knot

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Why an alternate collective noun should be a philosophy of tadpoles

A short personal essay about good intentions, unintended consequences and looking for meaning.

It happens every year. The perpetual(ish) puddle that my kids slide across on their bellies in winter and throw stones in during spring and autumn dries up in the summer. But not before some stubborn frogs lay a bunch of frogspawn in it. Many species return to the same place they spawned year after year, and apparently, common frogs can live upwards of seven years. Maybe they didn’t get the note about climate change and drier summers—still preferring to risk laying eggs in their familiar spots: ponds.

Now, I use the term pond loosely. What we’re really talking about is a divot in the ground on the edge of a quarry that routinely fills—or floods—with water. While I wouldn’t recommend messing around in active quarries, I’ve lived next door to this one for eight years. I walk around the edge with the dogs every day, so I’ve got a good sense of the land’s stability. Honestly, I’m not even sure how the place stays in business. Once every couple of months they seem to fire up the machines, but that’s about it.

We’ve collected tadpoles several times—feeding them dandelion leaves blanched in boiling water and dropped onto the surface of the tank. Once we have little froglets, we release them.

This year, we’re only just out of April showers and the pond is tiny. In my mind, this usually happens much later. While the water is often low and we often “rescue” tadpoles, I don’t think I’ve ever looked at it and thought, Hey, these guys are all doomed.

So I rallied/pestered/marshalled the kids into their wellies and we set off—two of us full of cold—with a large bucket and a scoop to rescue as many little wrigglers as we could.

It did not go according to plan.

The fine sandy soil around the edge of the puddle was like quicksand, spilling over our boots and working its way through any cracks. My son got stuck once by accident—and I mean really stuck. We had to use sticks to dig him out and rock the wellies back and forth. Then he got stuck twice more on purpose.

The water was so shallow that I had to scoop at a very shallow angle. If I moved too fast, I just got mud; too slow, and they wriggled away. The ripples from scooping also washed many up onto the mud, where they got stuck. I had to painstakingly pick them up or gently flick them back in.

The more I scooped and rescued, the lower the water level dropped. Then we had to carry—what I now realised was an excessively large 25L bucket—about 400 to 500 metres to the bottom of the quarry, where there’s a year-round pond. (Again, safety note: I know this quarry very well. I use the machine road and only did this when the quarry was closed.)

To replace the water we’d scooped out with the tadpoles, we carried a half-full bucket back up out of the quarry to refill the puddle.

We repeated the process again. But the more I tripped and fell at the edge of the puddle while rescuing tadpoles, the more the soggy quicksand ground shifted, distorting the puddle and stranding even more.

After the second load of tadpoles had been released—and we were covered toes to knees, fingers to elbows, and splattered everywhere in between—it was time to call it a day.

I felt bad walking away. But saving them all seemed impossible, because everything I did had unintended consequences. I tried to hold on to the image of all the tiny tadpoles swimming in the shallows of the pond at the bottom of the quarry, rather than those stranded on the mud, struggling to make it back into the water. We replenished the puddle one last time, hoping to give the others a bit more of a fighting chance. Then, with dripping noses and achy arms, we headed home.

The whole thing wouldn’t stop churning around in my head. It was like I had to make meaning out of it—learn a lesson, come to a conclusion. What an odd, overwhelming compulsion it is to assign meaning to an event.

Perhaps in caveman times or ancient Egypt, if I’d been contemplating this, I would have drawn a cave painting of wise tadpoles sent from above to teach me a lesson? Honestly, probably not. I’d be thinking about food. But throughout history, symbology and religion have assigned higher meaning to stories and events.

Now, I do believe in a God—but I also believe he’s a hands-off kind of guy. The nonsense we get up to is a result of our free will. If he kept stepping in, it would mean influencing people—and then free will wouldn’t exist. And what kind of test of character would that be? (Maybe he sends signs, but it’s still up to us to follow them.)

So as I pondered whether there was a deeper meaning, I also resisted the idea.

The next day, I missed my morning walk but went in the evening. The puddle was gone—completely churned up and destroyed by some of the quarry machinery during their bi-monthly parade.

Lesson?

There is no lesson. Just do good things—even if they’re hard—before the opportunity is gone.