Celebrate your teenager’s birthday with an awesome pirate party, including an escape-room style treasure hunt. There’s ideas for a message-in-a-bottle invitations, a cardboard pirate ship, an aged treasure map, a realistic treasure chest, and more!
My 13-year-old daughter wanted to celebrate her birthday with a pirate party. Not a little kid party, but an escape room-style treasure hunt. So we created an epic treasure map to lead them on a treasure hunt that took about an hour and a half. Read on to see how we created this unforgettable treasure quest.
After you look through this post, make sure to watch our video on how to turn a cardboard box into a treasure chest. It’s so easy and it’s the main prop for this party!
Treasure Map
Planning this party started with figuring out the treasure hunt and creating a map. The pirate map is the focus of the entire event. It will be part of the invitations, the decorations, and, of course, the main activity of the party.
Plan the Clue Locations
A Treasure Hunt needs hidden clues, which means the first step is to figure out where to hide the clues. We picked 9 locations to hid clues, with the final location being the spot where we would bury the treasure chest. Our locations included our sandbox, a lemon tree, and the neighbor’s front fence. Because I knew I would need to draw clues about these places on our treasure map, I picked places that had something easily recognizable that I could draw.
Create the Map
Drawing the map took me a long time and a lot of erasing because I am not an artist. I started by drawing the shape of our house on the center of a large paper. The clue locations are all around our house so I made our house the “ocean” by drawing waves inside the shape.
Next I drew simple pictures of the 9 locations. A lemon for the lemon tree, a cave for the tree fort my kids created in our front yard, and an X near the front of our house where we would bury the treasure. I connected all of the clues on the map with a dotted line, just to show that it’s a treasure hunt.
After my simple drawings, we needed to decorate the map to look more like a pirate map. Since I didn’t feel confident enough with my drawing skills, I asked my daughter to draw some pirate-themed decorations on it. I love the octopus!
When the map with all drawn, I went over everything with a ball point pen. A Sharpie would have worked too.
Age the Treasure Map
To make our pirate map look more authentic, we aged the paper. First, we bunched the paper up into a ball to add wrinkles and texture. Then we painting lemon juice on it, with lots of dripping. Then we baked it in the oven.
Once the paper was aged, we added even more character by burning parts of the edges. You’ll want to do this carefully, preferably outside or over a sink and with some water nearby.
Last, we tore up the map to create the clues. I started by tearing out the 9 location clues. These would be found during the treasure hunt as they followed the clues. Then I tore a couple more larger pieces, like parts of the house, that might be essential in following the map. Finally, I tore what was left, the unimportant parts, into enough pieces to give to each guest with their invitation. These needed to be unimportant in case a guest couldn’t come or forgot to bring their “clue”.
Create the Puzzle Clues
To create a treasure hunt, each of the 8 locations needed a clue piece of the map and a puzzle to help them figure out where to go next. Each puzzle, once it was solved, gave a good description of where the next clue was hidden.
For example, this rebus gives the clue of “fire hydrant”. Once they got to the fire hydrant, they found the part of the map with a fire hydrant on it and a puzzle to the next place.
Cryptex
The first puzzle to start the game was a cryptex that I made. You can read how I made the cryptex soon. It is a fun puzzle that we’ve used a few times since. I decided to use it first because it looked cool and because it was the most difficult puzzle to solve.
Pirate Invitations
For pirate party invitations, we create a call to join the pirate crew with the date and info. It was a pretty simple invitations, but to make it more interesting, we aged it using the same process as we did we the map.
We painted it with lemon juice, baked it, and charred the edges.
Then we rolled it up and stuck it in a bottle. We found these perfect bottles on Amazon with lids. We added a little sand from our sandbox and a shell from this pack we found at Dollar Tree. We had an awesome message in a bottle to deliver to our guests.
The Pirate Ship
Our main decoration was, of course, a pirate ship. We called a few stores that sell appliances to ask for appliance boxes. Some weren’t able to give us any or didn’t have any on hand, but our local Lowe’s did. Big shout out to Lowe’s because since the Pirate party we’ve asked them for boxes and cardboard many times, including for our Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, our Camp Halfblood party, and our Nauvoo Christmas village!
We wanted the cardboard pirate ship to cover the front of our deck so that the deck would feel like the ship. So we took the boxes and laid them out, slightly overlapped, to make the length of the deck. Then we drew the outline of the pirate ship on them, adding windows, portholes, and an upper deck. We picked a good spot where the “ship” would have an opening in the cardboard for the party friends to come aboard.
We used a box cutter to cut out the cardboard pieces along the lines that we drew. I’ve researched lots of ways to cut cardboard, and a box cutter, or utility knife, seems the simplest and cheapest way to cut it. Then we painted the details on the ship.
Inside the ship (on our deck), we set up an area that was the Captain’s Quarters with a table and decorations. The back of the cardboard ship was perfect for displaying a map and hiding some treasure hunt clue parts.
Pirate Party Food
The food for the party was pretty simple, standard party food: chips, drinks, and hot dogs. But I also found this fun idea on Pinterest. I cut a large watermelon in half and scooped out most of the fruit inside. Then I cut pieces from the smaller half into four rectangles and a triangle to be sails for a watermelon boat. I used wood skewers as masts and pushed the skewers through the sails and then down into the larger half of the watermelon. I filled the watermelon pirate ship with most of the fruit I had scooped out of it before.
We also like making homemade root beer for our parties. Not the kind you make from actual roots. We just buy the root beer extract, add sugar and water, then an hour or so before the party, we add a pound or two of dry ice. It looks really impressive and tastes really good.
Pirate Party Games
Before we started the main event (the treasure hunt) we played a few fun party games.
Pirate Name
Everyone needs a pirate name to join the pirate crew, so the first thing we had guest do as they arrived was to figure out their pirate name. There are plenty of “pirate name creators” online, so we printed one out. Once everyone had a pirate name, they signed on to join the crew by signing their new name to the pirate code.
Coconut Bowling
For our next activity, we bought a plastic bowling set from Dollar Tree and a couple of coconuts from the supermarket. The guests took turns bowling across our lawn and trying to knock down the plastic pins with a coconut. Hint: There is no skill involved, only luck.
Walk the Plank Over Sharks
We set up a large plank of wood on two cinderblocks on our grass. There’s large sponged between the wood and the cinder block so that the plank moves a little. Then we put a kiddie pool underneath. We cut out shark shapes out of foam and put them in the kiddie pool. (If you’ve read any of our costume posts, you know we use floor mat foam for a lot of things!) The foam sharks float really well on water. Surprisingly, the teenagers thought this party game was hilarious and did it several times.
Sword Decorating and Sword Fight
We bought a bunch of foam pirate swords from Dollar Tree (luckily our party was near Halloween was Dollar Tree has costume swords). Everyone used markers to decorate and personalize their sword. This activity was a big hit too.
Once everyone had their own personal sword decorated, they had an epic sword fight. There were no teams and no keeping score, just a huge sword fight, pirate-style.
Photo Booth
We’ve realized that an important part of teenage parties is letting the guests photograph themselves. We set up a Photo Booth with pirate props and costumes and also set up an iPad on a tripod. The kids with their own phones take selfies. The rest take photos with the iPad app and email their photos to themselves or their parents.
Pirate Treasure Hunt
Once the games and food had gotten everyone excited about being at the pirate party, we started the treasure hunt. I gathered all of the guests together and gave them the Cryptex and a clue to solve it. They had to solve a riddle to get the word that would open the Cryptex.
The clue inside the Cryptex led them to the clue hidden inside the pirate ship on the deck. Each clue led them to the next location where they found a piece of the map and a new clue. The last location just had the part of the map with the X.
I think their favorite clue location was the one inside a box on top of our roof. It was just above our garage door and they had to use a tennis ball to knock down the box to get the clue.
After all the parts of the map and clues were found, everyone pulled out their pieces of the map from their invitations and the other pieces of the map they found at the party. Now all of the pieces needed to be put together like a jigsaw puzzle to find out where the treasure was hidden.
A Helpful Note: My daughter invited 16 friends who all came to the party. In hindsight, this was too many people to work together on the treasure hunt. About 8 to 10 kids had fun following all of the clues and finding the treasure. The rest of the kids just hung out in our backyard and ate snacks. It worked out okay, but I would invite fewer friends if we did an escape room-style party again.
They pieced together the map and found that the X marked a spot in our front yard. (This was before we did all of our landscaping, so there was a large area that was just dirt.) The spot where we’d buried the treasure box was easy to see once they knew where to look. It was the only place that looked freshly “dug up” and the treasure chest was only under an inch of dirt.
The Treasure Chest
I made the treasure chest from 2 Amazon boxes—we have enough of them. You can watch a video here of how I made the treasure chest. It’s really simple!
I filled the treasure chest with candy ring pops, candy necklaces, chocolate coins, and toy bead necklaces. Then I put the whole thing inside a clear plastic bag so that no dirt would get inside and spoil the candy.
Treasure Chest Cake
To follow the pirate theme, I made a cake that looked like a treasure chest protected by a sea creature. I baked the cake in two loaf pans for the top and bottom of the chest. After covering them with chocolate frosting, I put straws into the bottom of the chest to hold the chest open.
I used yellow fondant to make the gold details of the chest. Mostly they were just strips of fondant. The key hole was a little fancier.
I ground up graham crackers to look like sand and then filled the inside of the “chest” with chocolate coins, letting them spill around the sides. For the sea creature, I made Rice Krispy Treats and added green food coloring when I was melting the marshmallows. Before the Rice Krispy Treats hardened, I shaped them into four long “legs”. I draped the legs over and around the chest to look like tentacles protecting the treasure.
This pirate party was a lot of fun. It’s great now that my kids are older, we can plan and host more elaborate parties and activities. The set-up for this party was a lot of work, especially planning the treasure hunt. But during the party, the kids entertained themselves. It was awesome to watch.
If you liked these party ideas, be sure to check out my other party ideas!