Costume Party Checklist

Ever feel like you want to experience a whole new world and leave your normal life behind? A costume party is a great way to fulfill that desire of experiencing a new world. At a costume party, you can be whatever and whoever you want. However, planning one might not be as simple as it seems because there are many things to consider. To help you plan your next costume party, we prepared a customizable costume party checklist to make the process much easier. We have also provided a guide on how to plan a costume party with our checklist template. 

5 Reasons to Love Our Costume Party Checklist

1. Automatic Timeline

How long does it take to plan a costume party, you ask? We believe that there is no fixed time frame that will work for everyone. Since everyone has their own specific situations and timeframes we created a checklist that will help you countdown the days till your surreal costume party.

First, pick a few dates and get the responses of your guest to see what day works the best. Unlike other checklists that show you a time frame that doesn't change, ours is flexible to your schedule. Just add the day you started planning your costume, along with what day you’ll be holding the costume party, and each task included in the worksheet will get an assigned due date!  This will help you plan and make sure you have everything taken care of before the event.

2. Visuals

Our template is formatted to help you easily see what tasks need to get done, and which should have higher priority.

• Shopping for the best costume?  Check the box in the row for choosing the best costume, and it will turn green.  This helps you visually spot which tasks are still outstanding.
• Did you get caught up with your busy schedule?  If you start to approach a due date, it will turn yellow.  If it passes without completion, it will turn red.  This will help you prioritize tasks.

3. Shareable!

Suppose you want to plan this event with other people. In that case, our checklist enables you to assign a task to a specific person. As long as they have a Gmail account, they can have access to the checklist as a collaborator/editor. The feature is special to our checklist and won't be seen anywhere else. We believe that events should be a collaborative effort because it can be a really stressful task to do things independently. Our suggestion would be to assign half of your group to focus on purchasing the food while the other half focuses on buying the drinks. 

4. Helpful Links

The template doesn’t just help you plan your time, it connects you with great resources in a single click.

• Want to survey your friends to find the best time to hold your costume party?  Links to useful websites and apps are included.
• Want to have the best decorations?  Easily find every service - from venues and caterers to DJs and decorators - you need in one place.
• Budgeting is a huge part of party planning.  It doesn’t need to be difficult, though!  Just use our budget worksheet, created just for your extravagant costume party!  A link to this sheet will be included in the checklist.
• Need to order supplies?  We’ve got you covered.  Just click!
• Want to get the creative juices flowing with some fun party tips and ideas?  We’ll link right to the articles you need.

5. Customizable

This is no generic planning guideline that will result in an amazing costume party. So instead, we provided some suggestions for tasks that will help you create your customized costume party checklist.

Selecting a Theme & Decorations

If you are still unsure about what theme you should choose, ask your guests for input and see which theme frequently pops up among their answers. Another method is choosing either a unique or general theme. General themes will appeal to more people than unique themes. After selecting a theme, you should start thinking about the decorations. The decorations are a small detail that has an immense impact on how immersed you guests feel. After you decide on a list of decorations that match your theme, you can put them on our checklist. Our checklist has a special feature where you could put links to sites where you are purchasing the decorations.

• Unique Themes for your costume party checklist:
  • Pokemon theme
  • Game of Thrones theme
  • Rick and Morty theme
• General Themes for your costume party checklist:
  • Horror theme
  • Fantasy theme
  • Mystery theme

 Food for the Costume Party

For food, you should think about something that your guests can easily eat. Since the main portion of a costume party is playing games and socializing with each other guests, the menu should be built around food that can easily be eaten while standing with minimal clean up afterward. One suggestion would be to order pizza, which is easy to eat and doesn't need to be prepared in advance. After creating the menu, you should consider what type of drinks you want to have at the costume party.

Drinks for the Costume Party

If your guests are of the legal drinking age, having alcoholic beverages can help loosen up your guests and eliminate tension. When considering our current times, all of your guests should have tested negative for COVID-19 in order for them to attend and to also pour them an alcoholic drink. Another option will be hiring a bartender to serve guest drinks. However, you should not forget to have non-alcoholic drinks for those who do or cannot drink. Considering our current times, you should pick drinks that are individually packaged. Some drink options are individually packaged Coca-Cola canned drinks, Arizona Ice Tea, and Snapple fruit drinks.

Fun Activities

In our current times, we must incorporate social distancing when holding activities. However, these activities still need to create a sense of fun and closeness with each guest. Since our checklist can be collaborated on by many individuals simultaneously, you can list the activities you have chosen and turn them into tasks. Then, allow the other people that are helping you plan the costume party to assign themselves the activity they want to work on. 

• Activities for your costume party checklist
  • Among Us: A mystery multiplayer game that can be played on your phone. This game will eliminate the need to get too close to other guests.
  • Pictionary: This popular party game can now be played on your mobile phones. This is a fantastic game to play that doesn't require your guests to be close to one another. 

Costumes Optional?

After you have planned everything out, your final consideration is to either make it an option to wear a costume or not. Making it an option will allow guests to not feel pressured into doing something they possibly don't want to do. However, making it mandatory will add to the party's atmosphere, which will help immerse you and your guests in a different world. 

How to Use Our Costume Party Checklist

Simply click the download button below to get started. We have created a step-by-step guide to take you through using our checklists: how to share your checklists with fellow planners, how to add/edit/delete tasks, how to sort/filter/reorder tasks, and more.

Conclusion

Many of these ideas do not have a set date to accomplish them, as you may have noticed. It’s mainly because everyone's circumstances are different, which means that your costume party checklist should be specialized for your current situation and needs. At Easy Event Planning we believe that planning a costume party should be fun and, well, easy! Our customizable checklist template will help ensure that all of your plans are in order before the event. If you enjoy using this checklist, you’ll love our planning tools for other events, too!

Written by Bryk Li