Most party guides give one list for “kids”, and that’s why so many parties sag in the middle. A four-year-old and an eleven-year-old don’t want the same evening — they don’t even want the same kind of story.

Below: the best ideas for every age — and after them, the things every party needs, whatever the age.

Ages 4 to 6: The Evening That Doesn’t Need a Plot

At this age a game should last under five minutes and require no reading at all. Hunting for hidden objects, throwing things at a target, copying movements, matching pictures. Anything longer and you lose them mid-sentence.

What the story has to give them: a character to help, and nothing more. At five, a child doesn’t need a plot. A good opening and good characters are enough, and the goal has to be something they can hold in their heads all evening — one person in trouble, one thing to fix.

Ours opened with the vampire’s daughter arriving in tears: the other monsters have locked her father up for the crime of liking humans, and she has a plan. If the children charm the monsters one by one, the monsters will agree that people aren’t so bad. That was the whole story, and it carried three rooms, three tasks and three keys.

The tasks were the games. A skeleton with a ghost problem in his attic: white paper cups with faces drawn on them, hidden around the room, then found, stacked into a pyramid and knocked down by throwing a plastic bone at them. It took four minutes and they asked to do it three more times.

A mummy with no friends, who needed two more built out of toilet roll. A witch who’d dropped her beads into bowls of something horrible — pasta for brains, dried apricots for ears, olives for eyes.

Each character handed over a key. Three keys opened the door and freed the vampire.

One game for the table. When the children sat down to eat, an awkward silence fell and a word game rescued us. It’s called Fortunately, Unfortunately. You start a story: “Deep in the forest lives a witch who makes the best sweets in the world. You decide to steal some. Fortunately, she’s out.”

The next child continues with “Unfortunately…”, the next with “Fortunately…”, and so on round the table.

Ours went from a rope trap to a penknife to a dragon in four turns and had the whole table helpless with laughter. It costs nothing and needs no preparation at all. Encourage everyone, but don’t push a child who’d rather not.

How to end it. A big, loud finish is the best thing you can give them — the last twenty minutes are what they’ll be telling their parents about in the car. Ours ended with the vampire himself, freed at last, walking into the living room. He led the children off into an imaginary dark forest, one creeping step at a time, until the noises got too much and everyone ran and hid.

Then a duel with inflatable swords, a portrait of the birthday boy painted onto a pumpkin, a cave made of a hoop and linked arms, and the boy himself wrapped head to foot in a web of friendship.

And by the time he finished, the sky had gone properly dark outside — which is when the candles came out and it was time to make a wish.

Two warnings. If the children have never played quests before, keep the parents close — even a confident child hesitates to open a door knowing there’s a monster behind it. And tell the adults in advance that they’re in the game too, because one parent standing in the corner on their phone changes the temperature of a room.

If you’d rather not build it yourself. The House of Whispering Bandages starts at exactly this age — it runs four to ten — and needs no printing and no shopping: five minutes of preparation and one toilet roll. You read the story and hand out the tasks, mostly sitting down, because in this game you’re playing a cat.

And for the quiet stretch between the running-about games, Bingo Boo Game: The Chronicles of Halloweenville replaces the numbers with riddles written as police reports — an adult reads them out, the children find the matching picture. Ten minutes to set up, half an hour to an hour to play, and it works from five upwards, grandparents included.

Ages 7 to 9: The Evening That Needs a Reason

The same physical games still work at this age. What changes is that the children want to know why they’re doing them.

What the story has to give them: a problem worth solving, and a reward that leads somewhere. The structure is a chain. A character has a problem. The children fix it. They’re given something for it, and that something is what gets them to the next character. Nothing is a standalone game any more; everything is a step.

Make each task cost something: a riddle the skeleton wants answered before he’ll hand anything over, one of the witch’s recipes written in a simple cipher, a rule that only two children may touch the beads at a time so the rest have to direct them.

Give them jobs, not just turns. At this age a group runs better when someone is the map-keeper, someone does the talking to the monsters, someone carries the keys. Rotate the jobs between tasks and nobody stands about.

Ideas that land at this age.

Wrap a grown-up. Not each other: an adult, volunteering, in a chair. Two teams, one roll each, three minutes. The adult must then walk across the room without falling over, which is where it stops being a craft and starts being funny.

The monster’s shopping list. A list in crooked handwriting: something that was alive, something that smells wrong, something with a hole in it. They hunt round the house and argue about what counts.

Guess the sound. Play a spooky noise and let them guess what made it — a creaking door, a bag of crisps, a wet sponge. Two guesses each, and the character won’t hand over the key until they’ve got three right.

How to end it. The reward has to be visible and shared: a door that opens, a cage that unlocks, a character who walks in transformed because of something they did. A prize handed out at the end of a party is a party bag; a prize the children unlock is the story’s ending.

If you’d rather not build it yourself. Frank and his Spooky Gang is built on exactly this chain — Frank Einstein has locked his friend the Mummy in a cryptex and can’t remember the code — for six to eleven-year-olds. You print it at home and it runs for an hour and a half.

Ages 10 to 13: The Evening That Needs a Real Puzzle

Older children want to be treated as capable. They want a puzzle with a real answer, and they want the adults to stop hovering.

What the story has to give them: something to work out, and the room to work it out in. Not a chain of tasks handed to them one at a time — a situation with clues in it, several possible answers, and an ending they reach themselves.

Practical shape. Give them everything at once rather than in sequence: a map, a set of documents, objects to examine, a deadline. Let them split up and come back.

Ideas that land at this age. Build one case, not five games.

A crime scene, not a party. Tape an outline on the kitchen floor, bag three objects as evidence, write out a witness statement that contradicts itself in one place. That contradiction is the whole puzzle, and they will find it.

Suspects who talk back. Two adults play suspects, each with one prepared lie. Five questions per child, then the room decides.

Ink they can’t read. A UV pen, or lemon juice and a warm lamp. Old trick, and it has never once failed to make a table of twelve-year-olds go quiet.

A code hidden in the food. The little cards labelling the dishes carry the cipher. They’ll walk past it four times before someone shouts.

If you’d rather not build it yourself. Count Blackmore’s Secret Double is a gothic mystery for eight to thirteen: a ghost comes home to find someone identical sitting at the head of his table, and nobody has noticed the swap.

From twelve upwards, Escape the MushROOM is a full escape game — around an hour and a half of puzzles, with enough Stranger Things in it that teenagers stop asking how long this is going to take. One mother who played it with her teens wrote that she was still thinking through a clue when they had already solved it, which is the whole point of this age group.

The Three Things That Actually Matter

An evening sized for the age in the room, not one list for “kids”.

One story running through it instead of a pile of separate games.

Grown-up helpers on the day — asked early, one job each.

Everything else — the cobweb tablecloth, the mummy sausage rolls, the ghosts made out of balloons — is decoration around those three.

If you’d like the story part done for you, the printable Halloween games are ready to download and print tonight.