If you’re a parent, chances are that you’ve come across Halo in some shape or form, whether from tv adverts, your child’s gaming habits or your own. Halo is one of the best known first person shooter games – and one of the most complex in terms of world building – the storyline itself is full of terms, add to it some player lingo and talking to your child can feel like an exercise in Mandarin (at least it’s not Icelandic, with words like Alþjóðaflutningaverkamannasambandsins – brr). That means that if you hear your child saying UNSC, you can stop jumping for joy, they aren‘t interested in UN‘s security council, but rather the in-game United Nations Space Command. With such a complex world, with various alien species that have their own history and culture, even some of the veteran players can get lost (well, that, or they are there just for the thirll of the game and the rest is cometized „blah“.) If it takes nothing short of a natural disaster to pry your child away from playing Halo on his console/gaming pc then it might just be time to throw him or her a Halo themed birthday party.
Below you‘ll find some Halo birthday party ideas suitable for all ages (and all degrees of game knowledge).
Halo Birthday Party Invitations and Ideas
Personalized Halo birthday party invitations by Tony Party Favor store via Etsy
The first step in protecting humanity from the latest Covenent threat is making sure that you have your troops assembled. If you want to get creative, you can send them a UNSC draft notice: To the people of the outer colonies – join in the fight for humanity’s survival against the Covenant. You are to report to (address) for your first mission: To celebrate (child’s name)’s birthday.
Alternatively, you can make your own invitation using one of these two backgrounds (one and two). You can add logos to the invites, like the Halo legendary difficulty logo or the Halo Spartan logo.
In terms of text, you can add an invitation to a specific mission, in this case, Cortana (widely regarded as one of the most difficult missions, aside with the Library one). You can make your text sound like a variation of this one: “Welcome to the rescue Cortana mission. You are invited to join John-117 and (birthday boy/girl name) on a raid to High Charity (your home). The place is infested by the Flood with the Gravemind using the Council Chamber as a throne room. You need to rescue Cortana in order to activate Installation 04B.”
For the icing on the cake, so to speak, you can also send a CD with the invite, containing a mission intro trailer. Or, even better, you can turn your card into a musical card and add the Halo theme song.
If you like getting crafty, you can include their own Halo badges that they can pin – here’s how to make them. Nicely enough, Halo, like most games of its type, has a whole variety of achievement badges that you can unlock – the names are hilarious, like Killionaire (or Killpocalyplse) and there are plenty of templates, like this one.
Another Halo party invitations idea is to include halo dog tags in your invites. You can make them using this tutorial and for bonus likeness points, you can print cut and glue the UNSC logo on the back of the tags – or can spray paint it – here’s how to make stencils.
If time is a major factor, and you’re particularly short on it, then you can always buy the invitations from Amazon or Etsy – there are plenty of customizable templates, some of them even offering you the possibility of inserting your own child’s photo.
Halo Birthday Party Decorations and Ideas
Halo master Chief wall decals available from Amazon.com
Once the invites are sent, you need to prepare the base for the oncoming recruits. Since the game is in effect based on the military, you can greet your guests with a Camo Balloon Arch. This is the look you’re aiming for. For those that don’t have a secret identity or skill set related to balloons (secretary by day, balloon twister by night), it might be good to check out some tutorials, like this one here – it should be enough to get you started (you’ll just have to use dark green, light green and black balloons).
To create a bit of all around atmosphere, use some white, black, green, blue streamers that are twisted together to look like camo – those colors match the general Halo color scheme. Put some Halo posters in strategic places and the mood is set.
While on the theme of creepy crawling aliens, you can also have a few of them standing in your hallway by making cardboard stands. Use the warrior races templates of the Shangeili or Jiralhanae. You can make them A4 sized and scatter them about the house (poking out of the plants, for instance). If you’re not quite sure how to get them to stay upright, there are tutorials on how to make the cardboard figure stand.
Another idea for halo themed party decorations is to use some gear/toy props. If you have any halo gear, you can set bits and pieces on display. You can even make your own grenade lookalikes based on baseballs using this tutorial. If you like dreaming big, there is also the option of making a rocket launcher – it has the added advantage that kids will play with it (two in one – decoration/game…makes me think of shampoo commercials, two in one, conditioner and shampoo).
Halo Birthday Party table setup
With the house all gloriously set, it’s time to turn your eyes to the party table and mess hall (quite literally a ‘mess’ hall, when dealing with children). To knock their tiny socks off, you should start off by naming your food stand the “World Cuisine” after a restaurant in New Alexandra on the planet Reach.
Since there is a military undercurrent to the game, some simple decorations involve army camouflage colors – camo tablecloth, napkins, army camo food labels and cupcake wrappers – there is an endless supply of things that can be colored with it. A good idea would be to keep the camo as a background to your display. Instead of the camo tablecloth, you can make one with the Halo logo (Halo 3) – you need to print it, trace it and cut it out of felt/other materials and then sow it on – with sufficient patience, you can place several logos on.
Your plates should also get involved in the action and transparent plates are the best, since you can stick anything on their bottom and it will show through, like halo scopes or cut outs of Spartan troopers or alien invaders. If you have some Halo figurines, you can have them mounting an assault (on a mountain of cupcakes/fries/ other stackable food).
You can also scatter grenades on the table – if you have toy grenades. Or you can make your own baseball grenades.
Another Halo party table set up idea is to go zombie. There is a zombie mode (that in Halo 3 is called Infection). For this you can spray paint red blood splatters on a white table cloth and add some of the old forgotten Halloween decorations – plastic eyes, ears etc.
Halo Costumes/Outfit Ideas
Halo Master Chief costume available from Amazon.com
Once your restless decorating hands have finished with the home it’s time to turn your attention to the children – after all, the mission leader needs to set an example (both in terms of conduct and dress code). Fortunately, there are quite a bit of Halo costume tutorials out there, in the vast reaches of the internet. To start you off simply, you can prepare a Halo costume with a toy gun and some camo face paint. If you’re looking for accuracy though, things get difficult – fast. There’s no in-between costume piece here – it’s from zero to full expert. Fortunately, it’s still quite doable if you have patience and some good tutorials to follow. The key word here is Pepakura – nope, that’s not a pepper diet or some sort of long lost Pokemon – it’s paper craft using card stock. If you’re interested in Cosplay, then you’ve probably heard of it before.
Here’s how you can make a Halo helmet – with cardstock and fiberglass resin. For a simpler model, with some pre-made parts that you have to purchase, you can try this tutorial on how to make a Halo Master Chief motorcycle helmet.
Back to Pepakura land, here’s how you can make the full Master Chief armor. For a more detailed tutorial, here’s how you can make the Halo ODST costume: chest, shoulders, side waist, central waist.
Once you have your armor, it’s time to gear up. Keep in mind that the tutorials for the gear are also time consuming. A simple version of a Halo 3 Assault rifle can be found here. For something more detailed though, you can check out this three part tutorial on the same type of weapon: part one, two, three. Use this template.
If a rifle is too bulky, you can make a Halo Magnum gun – it’s in the same style as those above, and it’s a five part tutorial, so buckle in: one, two, three, four, five.
Another Halo piece of gear you can add is an energy sword – and the end of all these tutorials, your inner DIY will rest happily.
Halo Party Food and drink Ideas
Halo offers a wide variety of foods that are being served in game, so you can easily label what you put on the table as ‘game food’ – it’s even easier since regular food like pizzas and clam chowder is featured.
To start off, you can put your troopers in the mood with some video game controller cookies.
For drinks you can either serve some Cortana neon blue soda and purple Covenant drinks or you can make use of the popular in game Blast Soda (looks like this). You can print the template, cut the text and glue it on a yellow/green soda can. For more fun to be had, you can add right under the soda station a label with: Achievment unlocked, Monumental Thirst – use this achievement template. If you really want to have a few laughs, you can use another popular drink from Halo, the dihydrogen monoxide (H2O – or water).
Another Halo party food idea is to fill up syringes with green or yellow jell-o and call them Stim-Packs.
Since I mentioned food, more substantial than cookies, you can serve your troops some Moa burger, for a real taste of home. Moa is a xeno-avian – extraterrestrial bird, resembling an extinct moa (current day emu) with a lizard head – in case you were wondering what goes in the burger ;). Here are a few burger recipes from the food and wine network.
You can also serve a Halo halo (from in the game) containing shaved ice, evaporated milk and toppings – here is a recipe.
You can also serve some Irukan grain pasta with Thorn Beast meat (essentially, spaghetti and meatballs). In addition, you can make some nice snacks like camo popcorn or Cortana popcorn – green and brown coated with candy melts or with blue ones (for Cortana).
For another bit of fun, you can serve mysterious fruit non-alcoholic punch and label it as Chef’s Surprise (the drink is present in the game, but no one knows for sure what is in it – it’s a drink surrounded in mystery).
Halo Birthday Cake and Cupcake Decorations and Ideas
Center stage is reserved for the birthday cake – and there are plenty of tutorials from vehicles to helmets.
In order of difficulty, let’s start with the easy to make fondant Halo cut-outs – you need to cover the cake in fondant, like here then print the templates and cut them out. You can try your hand with a Master Chief helmet, or if you’re confident enough, you can go for the full armor.
Following the same line, you can make a Halo ODST armor cake. You start by covering the cake in fondant, just like in the tutorial above. Then you make cut outs following the model here – you can also add one of the Halo logos, out of blue fondant like this one.
Next up, you can try your hand at a Halo Reach kit cake – use this cake recipe and images as templates, though keep in mind that you will have to add a lot of the details yourself.
You can also make a Halo Xbox cake (there was an edition made after the game). Here is how to make the cake –
There is even a tutorial for a Halo plasma grenade cake. While on the topic of weapons, you can make a Halo energy sword cake that should end up looking something like this . You can use this template and place it above the cake. For a lesson on cake carving check out this tutorial. Once you are done cutting, you need to ice the cake and cover it in fondant, like in the links above. For an extra effect, add some darker blue on the inside with food colorant (can paint it on) and paint some lightning strikes with white.
Another Halo birthday cake idea is to adapt this Nerf Gun Cake and make a Halo Magnum gun (or look-alike) – for extra realism, make it entirely black/grey.
For the Cake Masters out there, there are two more tutorials to try out – a Halo ghost cake and a Halo helmet cake tutorial (with another version here).
If you’re craving for some cupcakes, you can take advantage of the zombie mode and make some Mmm Brains cupcakes based on the delicious ’blood clot’ cupcakes. Underneath, you can add Mmm Brains badge.
Halo Party Games and activities
“What kind of halo player are you?” is a perfect ice breaker game – print out the types found in the first answer of the forum (children can identify with up to 3 types of the 57 Halo gamer types).
Halo has a lot of solo but also co-op campaigns which make for nice games in real life. For instance, you can play Grifball, where the aim of the game is to place the explosive in the other team’s gate. It was created by the Rooster Teeth Productions crew – Gavin and Burnie (or so the legend goes). In order to play it you should divide children in teams and place a time limit, after which the bomb (water balloon) explodes – this also makes the game more challenging since the team has to keep the balloon from popping (scraping on their armor/clothes or being snagged in branches). If the balloon bursts, victory goes to the other team, and the players are shuffled, and new teams formed. Players will be armed with super soakers and will try to kill the other teams’ members (2-3 shots to be eliminated).
The children can also play Flood – also with super soakers. Here a small unit of children with red headbands are the zombies –their aim is to infect the other people. They are a bit more resistant than the regular player, so it should take a few shots to kill them. Zombies are not allowed to carry guns. Once a player gets bitten (touched), he puts on a red band and joins the zombie crew. If all zombies are dead, then victory goes to the survivors, conversely, if all survivors are infected, then the zombies win.
Another game they can play is free-for-all-Oddball. Grab some skull shaped toys and place them around the yard. The game is played by individuals and the aim is to be able to hold the Oddball for 2 minutes. It requires some parents to keep track of who has the Oddball and how long they have kept it. Players can run and hide but they can’t use weapons when they have the skull. It takes two hits for them to be out. The players can respawn, but it takes them 5 minutes. You can play it with foam swords for variety and to make it easier for the people holding the skull – then you can call it Swordball.
Another possible game is Dominion – a sort of capture the hill with a twist. There are two teams – ones are attackers, the others are defenders. The defenders have to hold 3 bases for 10 minutes – they acquire them via race (once teams are decided, the defenders have 2 minutes to choose and set up in the bases – after that the attackers are free to assault them). If a member gets hit, it takes them 3-4 minutes to respawn (they go to the sidelines in the meanwhile). The children can also play a regular king of the hill version.
Lastly, they can play a Juggernaut game. Juggernaut, as the name suggests, is one against all. The aim of the child that plays the Juggernaut is to get as many people eliminated as possible. Each child will have his turn as the Juggernaut. The Juggernaut will have to be a bit harder to kill than the other players (2-3 hits, instead of one, for an elimination). Who has eliminated the most players as a Juggernaut wins.
Halo Birthday Party Favors and Ideas
Once all the fun has been had – and your garden has received more water than in an entire lifetime, it’s time to send the troopers home with a small favor bag. A nice idea is to use a green metal lunch box instead of a bag, and to print and glue a Halo themed wrap (check out the invitations section for nice Halo backgrounds). You can add a message where you thank them for their help in saving the universe. In the goodie bag you can place stickers and tattoos, or, if you did not use them for the invitations, either the Halo achievement badges or the Halo dog tags. You can add some grenade key chains made out of paracord – here is the tutorial. There is a whole host of merchandise available, from bracelets, to pins, Cortana chip keychains and bottle cap necklaces available on Amazon.
Halo Birthday Party Gift Ideas
Last, but most definitely not least, we should not forget about the birthday boy or girl.
In terms of clothing, you can find hoodies or t-shirts with the legendary difficulty badge or the UNSC crest. You can also find ones with Spartan troopers and Master Chief helmet. You can get the Halo UNSC M6 blaster, or the BOOMco. Halo Covenant Carabine blaster, or Energy Swords (made from titanium) on Amazon. There is also a limited collector’s edition Halo 5:Guardians Xbox – if you are willing to spend a bit extra. There is also a more affordable option with an Xbox one Limited edition Halo 5 Master Chief wireless controller.
In addition to that, you can always find some action figure sets on Amazon – from Spartan or Didact figurines to the Warthog vehicle pack. There are even Mega Blocks versions of the game available – like the Halo Firebase.
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