Honest Baby Shower Bingo Tips & Prize Ideas

"Don't do games, they're for basic bitches," my sister-in-law hissed at me across a lukewarm plate of mini quiches while balancing a mimosa on her hip. Then my mother leaned in, smelling heavily of Chanel No. 5 and unsolicited judgment, and whispered, "If you don't play games, people will think you're cheap and just want the gifts." And finally, my husband Dave, who was only there to carry heavy boxes and eat free food, texted me from the driveway where he was hiding: just let them drink and stare at you, who cares.

I was 33 weeks pregnant with Maya at the time. I was wearing this horrific yellow floral maternity dress that literally made me look like a walking school bus, the AC in the restaurant back room was broken, and I was on my third cup of iced half-caf coffee because I was aggressively sweating. I was, like, vibrating with anxiety about sitting in a chair while twenty-five women watched me unwrap tiny socks. It felt like I was preparing for some sort of literal baby show where I was the main exhibit, and the thought of it made me want to hide under the dessert table.

Which brings me to the only piece of party-planning advice you actually need to hear.

If you're spiraling about how to entertain these people while you slowly pull tissue paper out of gift bags, just print out some customized grids, throw some cheap candy on the tables for markers, and let them get aggressively competitive so everyone shuts up and stops staring directly at your face.

The agonizing gift unwrapping hour

Here's the reality of modern baby showers. You invite people you love, people you kind of like, and people you're biologically obligated to invite. You feed them. You talk about how tired you're. And then comes the main event, which is inevitably you sitting in a designated "throne" (oh god, the wicker chairs, why is it always wicker) opening presents for an hour.

It's boring as hell. For everyone.

You're trying to figure out how to act surprised when you open a box of breast milk storage bags—which you literally registered for, so it's not a surprise, it's just logistics—and your great-aunt is staring at you, waiting for tears of joy over nipple cream. And don't even get me started on the packaging. Why are baby items zip-tied to cardboard backing like they're trying to escape? I'm sitting there with a pair of safety scissors trying to free a pair of mittens while the room goes dead silent. The awkwardness is thick enough to choke on.

Anyway, the point is, you need a distraction. You need bingo cards for the baby shower.

The absolute genius of making them guess your gifts

There are technically a few ways to do this. I'll tell you about the one I love, which is Gift Bingo, and it's brilliant. You just give everyone a blank 5x5 grid before you start opening things. In the little squares, they've to write down what they think you're going to get. Swaddles. Diapers. A white noise machine. Organic nipple butter.

As you violently rip into the wrapping paper, they cross off the items.

Suddenly, the dead silence is gone. People are leaning forward in their chairs. My cousin Sarah literally screamed "YES, NOSE FRIDA!" across the room when I pulled a snot sucker out of a bag. It turns the most tedious part of the afternoon into a bloodsport. Your guests are no longer judging your forced smile; they're praying to the registry gods that someone bought you a bottle warmer so they can get a diagonal line.

If you've, like, fifty people and a microphone, I guess you could do traditional call-out bingo where someone just pulls baby words out of a hat, but honestly that feels like being at a retirement home in Florida and I hate it.

Explore Kianao's organic baby essentials collection to see the kind of stuff you actually want people to mark off on their bingo cards.

When someone actually buys the good stuff on your registry

Let me tell you about the moment someone really yelled "BINGO" at my shower. I was elbow-deep in a massive box from my best friend Rachel. I had explicitly told everyone, and by that I mean I complained to Dave loudly for months, that I was so sick of plastic toys that light up and sing electronic songs that drill into your skull.

My doctor, Dr. Aris, had casually mentioned to me at Leo's last checkup that babies can get totally overstimulated by all those flashing lights and robotic sounds, and she suggested sticking to natural materials to keep their nervous systems calm. I'm pretty sure she called it, like, tactile discrimination or sensory grounding? I don't know, science is mostly just trial and error as far as I can tell, but it sounded right to me.

So I opened Rachel's box and pulled out the Wild Western Play Gym from Kianao.

Oh my god, you guys. First of all, it's stunning. It has this solid wooden A-frame and these incredible little hanging toys—a wooden buffalo, a crocheted horse, a little cactus. It feels heavy and real. When I pulled the wooden buffalo out of the tissue paper, my aunt in the back row slammed her hand on the table and yelled "BINGO!" because she had written down "wooden toy."

I loved that gym so much. Maya spent her first six months basically living under it. The contrast between the cool, smooth wooden teepee and the soft, squishy crocheted horse was fascinating to her. She'd just lie there, batting at the little silver star, and I could drink my coffee in actual, literal peace without a plastic farm animal singing "the cow says moo" at me every three seconds. It's the kind of thing you save for your grandkids, not the kind of thing you donate to Goodwill three years later.

The gifts that are just... fine (and what to do with them)

Of course, not every bingo square is a massive victory. Someone else checked off "blanket" when I opened this organic cotton goose blanket.

Look, I'll be totally honest. It's a nice blanket. It's made of GOTS-certified organic cotton, which is great because I read somewhere that conventional cotton is sprayed with enough pesticides to kill a small horse, and Leo has super sensitive eczema skin so we try to be careful. The double-layer thing is nice because it doesn't make them sweat through their pajamas.

But it's covered in pink geese.

I'm just not a pink goose kind of mom. My house is mostly gray and navy and chaotic neutral. I opened it, smiled, thanked my husband's step-aunt, and figured I'd use it as a burp cloth. But you know how the universe works, right? Maya became absolutely obsessed with those stupid pink geese. She dragged that blanket everywhere. Through the mud, into the car, across the floor of the doctor's office (gross). I washed it on the heavy-duty cycle probably four hundred times and it never frayed or faded, which is honestly annoying because I kind of hoped it would fall apart. So, yeah. It's a really well-made blanket, even if the geese mock me daily.

Let's talk about prizes because tiny soaps are garbage

If you're going to make people play a competitive game, you've to give them something when they win. Don't give them a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer with a custom label that says "Maya's Baby Shower 2019." They will throw it in the trash in their car before they even pull out of your driveway.

Give them something they'll genuinely use.

At my shower, I gave out a few Walrus Silicone Plates as prizes. I know that sounds like a weird prize for an adult, but hear me out! Most of the people at my shower were moms of toddlers. If you've a toddler, you know the absolute hell that's mealtime.

Dave calls dinnertime with Leo "the hostage negotiation." Leo used to grab his plastic plates and frisbee them across the kitchen so hard I thought he'd break a window. The Walrus plate has this insane suction cup on the bottom. You stick it to the high chair tray and it doesn't move. Plus, it's divided, so the peas don't touch the chicken, which we all know is a completely rational reason for a three-year-old to have a full-blown meltdown.

My friend Jess won the blackout round of bingo, took home the walrus plate, and texted me three days later saying it was the best gift *she* had ever received. Screw the bath bombs, give the mothers what they want: a way to stop wiping spaghetti off the walls.

Managing the feral toddlers in the room

One last thing about playing games at these events. If you've a mixed-age shower, which I did because I couldn't find a babysitter for Leo and neither could half my friends, you need to manage the kids.

Kids don't care about you opening nursing bras. They care about destruction.

My trick was having a secondary, picture-based board for the kids. Instead of words, it had pictures of a bottle, a pacifier, a bear. But the real genius, if I do say so myself, was the markers. Instead of using those little plastic discs that kids will 100% try to choke on, we used M&Ms. Leo spent the entire hour quietly eating his bingo markers off the floor, and I didn't care because I was just grateful he wasn't screaming. You could use stickers, I guess, if you're a better mom than me, but chocolate buys silence.

So, print the cards. Let them guess. Get the good prizes. Drink the coffee. And remember that the gift-opening hour will eventually end, and then you can go home and put on sweatpants.

Ready to build a registry that people will honestly want to check off their bingo cards? Browse Kianao's full collection of sustainable, organic baby goods here.

Messy questions you probably have about this

Do I've to provide the pens?
Oh god, yes. People never have pens in their tiny, useless aesthetic purses. Buy a giant pack of those cheap ballpoint pens and just throw them on the tables. Don't buy personalized pens. Nobody wants a pen with your unborn baby's name on it. Just get the cheap blue ones and be done with it.

What if someone wins five minutes into the gift opening?
This happened at my shower! My sister got a line after I opened four gifts in a row from the same person who just bought all the boring basics. You just tell them to keep playing. Make them play for four corners, or an outer frame, or a full blackout. Just keep changing the rules until you're done opening boxes. The game serves you, not the other way around.

Is it tacky to put my registry link on the bingo card?
Dave thought it was, but Dave also thinks cargo shorts are making a comeback. Look, they already bought the gifts. The registry link just helps the people who procrastinated and showed up empty-handed feel guilty enough to buy you something online while they sit there. So no, I don't think it's tacky. It's efficient.

Can we play this if we asked for books instead of cards?
Yes! Honestly, the book-instead-of-card thing is so common now that half the squares will just be "Goodnight Moon" and "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Just tell people to write down book titles instead of baby gear. Though, warning, you'll get like seven copies of "Guess How Much I Love You" and you'll have to pretend you're thrilled every single time.

How many squares should the board be?
5x5 is standard. Don't make it bigger than that or it takes way too long and people lose focus and start drinking heavily. And make sure the middle square is a FREE space. We need some easy wins in motherhood, starting right now.