Bakugan/Brawls Party 6yr

When my 6 year old told me he wanted a Bakugan Party I was a little freaked out because it is such a new thing. As usual I came straight to this website and used some of the ideas here. Invites: I went easy and used store Bought Bakugan invites Decorations: This was primarily an outdoor party, but I also decorated the inside of the house where the guests were greeted, served cake and did the bakugan launching game. We got red,orange,  and black helium balloons. Many of these were tied outside. I bought a soccer ball pinata. The week before on a sunny day, I spray painted it red (three coats 10 minutes for each to dry-not a big deal at all). The night before (of course) my husband cut out shapes from oaktag to make it into DRAGO, my son's favorite Bakugan. So he glue gunned a head, wings, tail and we did one more coat of spray paint. I think he used a few wooden skewers to hold the wings and head up. He added the WHITE bakugan sign to it last. We put this out on the table. It was VERY cool-since of course they don't sell anything like that. For the tables I used red tablecloth from a tablecloth roll that I already had. I had bought the Bakugan table cloth from the store. The characters are all on the side of it..so I decided to cut the cloth into strips. That gave me to strips with characters and one with the cool red bakugan designs. I put one character strip down the middle of my table that had the red cloth on it-as a runner. The red strip I put on my coffee table. The other character strip we hung up. We cut ONE piece of the repeating picture of the characters and taped it to our front door. It was really very cool. I had thought that I was going to scan pictures from a book or print them out, but cutting up that cloth was great- way cooler, cheaper, quicker and easier for us. I had another Bakugan table cloth and put this (uncut) on the outdoor table. I bought 10 cheap balls ($1.70 from the supermarket) of different sizes and put them on the lawn in the backyard with the rest of the balls that we have (all different non matching sizes-so that there were enough for each kid-16 total) I made a disc of music that included the Bakugan theme song and other songs that my son likes. Games: When the kids arrived they played in our back yard. We gave them bakugan masks and they around and played on the swingset, threw balls around. When all had arrived, I gathered them on the Bakugan Arena (a few beach towels) and reviewed that we were doing Bakugan Brawler training and that meant alot of fun and a lot of balls! They were psyched. Then we did: 1.Obstacle Course:(you have to train to be a good brawler), 2.Dodge Ball (THEY LOVED LOVED LOVED THIS, we did 3 games of this-two teams and I got them to make up names for their team: the Dragos and something else...), 3.Beach Ball Tag, 4. BASE Ball (you have three base, with an adult at each base, one ball. Kids have to run to base where they will not get tagged by the ball-VERY VERY FUN also.-you keep tagging kids until there's one left. we did this twice..the kids begged to do it again, but it was hot and they looked exhausted, so we moved to calmer things. 5. Inside: Bakugan Launching-as mentioned by others. My son has a round 'arena and we put 4 cards down kids took turns trying to roll their bakugan and land on cards. when they had their turn they proceeded to the 6. Coloring Contest Table where they each got a picture of Dan to color. My son picked the winner who got a Bakugan! Next we did 7. Bakugan Card Hunt: I bought two booster packs (20 cards). I took out 4 so there would be one card for each kids. My husband hid them and the kids went hunting ("bakugan cards fell from the sky in OUR yard!"). They went crazy for this. 8. Birthday Cake and Ice Pops 9. Pinata:Instead of piling candy in the pinata I made ziploc bags of treats for each kid. I did a few extra for the random siblings that show up. So each bag had 3 starburst a spiderman fruit snack packet a transformer fruit snack pack a fruit roll up and a lollipop. When the pinata burst and the kids went diving I just yelled to them one bag each! The kids were happy because they got their candy but the parents LOVED it: no cryiing no going home with too much candy...and I didn't have to pick up dirty candy from the yard... Food: Except for the cake I didn't go theme-like with the food. I served the things that my son sees as his favorite treats. I had the party at 2:30 so that I didn't have to serve a meal. We put out cheese puffs lemonade water juice seltzer. Between games we gave the kids ice pops and encouraged them to drink and rest in the shade. We had the cake. I made the cake myself and I have to say it was TOTALLY COOL! I used food coloring and sculpted the icing to look like a bakugan blast. I put some of the bakugan characters on top with a few laminated photocopies of cards (to not wreck real cards).  Party favors: I've been trying to phase out of the party favor thing. We never did this when I was a kid but the moms around here all seem to do it so with my past parties I did it too. Sometimes the kids leave with more stuff than the birthday kid gets! And I think that they would be perfectly happy just coming to the party. So anyway I figure that between games the kids each got a Bakugan sticker they got the mask when they came they got a bag of candy from the pinata. I had also bought a bakugan superball for each kids (in 4 packs) and a Wolverine cold pack that I had gotten at target each for $.25on clearance. So when they left they had all of the stuff from the party and my son gave them a superball coldpack and a balloon. I think that the loot from the party and a balloon would have been fine but they all seemed to like the ball and the moms liked the cold pack (vs. all of the usual junk we seem to take home that winds up lost in the pile of toys).  All in all my son had a great time and I enjoyed giving him another memorable birthday party.  Thanks again! This website is great and I come here whenever I'm doing a theme party. Saves to much time and gets me to think creatively and come up with my own takes on the ideas."