DIY Game Booth for Circus Themed Wedding or Party!

Create a fun and eye catching circus game booth and/or lemonade and popcorn stand out of scrap slab wood and other up-cycled items!

Step 1: Gather Tools, Slab Wood and Other Materials

Start with a free or cheap load of slab wood from a local mill. Gather up your chainsaw or hand saws, your screw gun and screws.

Step 2: Set Up Your Tent or Easy Up, and Hoist Your Center Pole

We decided to use some small frame tents to provided shape, guidance and the initial roof structure.

Optional Center Pole:

We buried a large wooden spar to make a dramatic center point for a double tent. An easier option would be to simply use a single tent with no center pole. There is a lot of flexibility in your design and we recommend being creative with the material you have access to and realistic with your abilities! We found it would be easiest to fix our plastic horse and home made flag bunting to the top of the pole before we hoisted it. We also fixed our parachute which would later become the faux tent roof to the spar. It is easier then being really creative with ladders later!

Step 3: Build the Walls and Sure It Up!

We began be reinforcing the tents legs and outer edge ground perimeter with the salvaged wood. We also put a cross support and an "x" brace at the height we wanted the serving counter to be.

After you have a strong frame, begin cutting the slab wood to your desired lengths and make decorative walls.

Step 4: Create Your Facade

We used a jig saw to cut out the shape of our facade. After we screwed it up, we painted a decorative circus boarder around it. The sky is the limit here and you could incorporate lettering or lights if you wanted. By now it's really starting to look like a rustic circus game both!

Step 5: Create Your Interior!

We made a bean bag toss our of angled slab wood and salvaged tin buckets. We also build shelves that displayed the prizes (one of the unique give-a-ways at our wedding).

We decided to make one side of the booth be for popcorn and lemonade, and the other for games, so we put a wide bar on the "food side," and a more narrow bar on the game side (later in the night the entire game booth became a colorful bar). We put shelves for game prizes along the back walls of the booth too.

Step 6: Decorate!

We stretched an old advertising parachute over our tents to create a circus tent aesthetic . You could use other fabric yardage or keep it simple by leaving the original tent canvas showing. We stocked the shelved with toys that we gathered (mostly from thrift stores and discards our friends with children no longer wanted). We ended up with a bunch of hot wheel cars that were a real hit as game prizes!