Fear Factor Party Idea

Lots of ideas for birthday parties for the aging have to do with, well, their age. While trying to come up with a good theme for your soon-to-be 40, 50, or 60 year old’s party, you’ve probably run into dozens of party ideas having to do with getting old or staying young, and they were probably all pretty much the same. But if you want your over the hill boy or girl’s birthday to be a little more special, try this unique party idea: the fear factor party.

If you’ve ever seen the television show Fear Factor (which you very well may not have, if you’re the same age as the birthday boy or girl), you’ll have some idea already of what this party entails. On the show, contestants win money by performing scary or disgusting tasks, the most common of which is eating something like bugs or animal parts.

The fear factor party is basically the same idea. We don’t want to advocate that you make your guests eat anything quite that disgusting, but there are plenty of disgusting food items that are actually (supposedly) edible that you can use.

Set out as many of the following items as you can get your hands on, and assign a difficulty to each one. If a guest eats an easy item, that’s five points. A medium item is ten, and a hard item is twenty. Guests can only get points for the same item once - eating three pieces of licorice won’t get you fifteen points! You can change the difficulties if you want, or add more items that you think adequately gross. But here are our recommendations of a basic list.

Easy:
Prunes
Licorice
Tapioca Pudding
Metamucil


Medium:
Olives
Olive Loaf
Prune Juice
Anchovies


Hard:
Potted Meat
Gifelte Fish
Octopus
Pickled Herring
Head Cheese


Set a time limit for the contest, so people can’t continue to gain points throughout the night. And make sure you have a judge (maybe one of your more squeamish guests, who can’t even bear to eat the easy items). Once time is up, the person who has accumulated the most points is the winner.

If there’s a tie, your tiebreaker can be a race or long jump or similar activity, to simulate the physical challenges that were also present on the Fear Factor TV show. Just make sure the physical challenge is one your guests are capable of doing! And of course, make sure that whether there’s a tiebreaker or not, whoever wins the Fear Factor Challenge gets a good prize. It doesn’t have to be $50,000, like the prize on the TV show, but don’t make them eat all those gross things for nothing!