For as long as I have known my husband, every birthday that he has had has been incredibly low key.

Except for that one time, when we all played glow golf in a shopping mall with no air conditioning in the peak of Florida’s heat… we try not to talk about that day… I’m sweating just thinking about it…

But since he never makes a big deal out of his own birthday, I decided to throw him a surprise party for his 25th birthday.

And what better party theme to do than that of his current obsession:

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Or, more specifically, the airdrop crates.

PUBG is his absolute favorite game at the moment, and he especially loves going after the airdrop crates (despite me and the rest of our squad insisting that we should avoid them and the potential bloodbaths that they can bring). So it only made sense to theme the party around that, by using the red and blue color scheme of the crates and the rough industrial vibe of the game itself.

My mom and I came up with the idea sometime in February, which gave us about two and a half months to plan the party by May 5th (his birthday is the 3rd, but held that party on that Saturday).

Initially, we thought it would be so easy, especially since she had managed to pull off surprise parties for both my 16th and 18th birthdays.

We did not, however, consider these three major obstacles:

My husband and I have joint bank accounts. Therefor, it would be incredibly difficult for me to withdraw substantial amounts of cash or make large transactions at party supply stores without him noticing. My husband and I spend virtually all of our free time together. We have similar work schedules, we have the same friends, and I am an introverted homebody who really only likes to leave the house if it’s to go somewhere with him. As far as we could find, there were no decent posts or photos of any kind on Pinterest, Reddit, or any other sites of someone who had done a PUBG themed party. The closest thing I found was someone who had done a Fortnite party, which was awesome, but those ideas didn’t translate easily to our PUBG theme, so we really had to come up with everything from scratch on this one.

It was a pain in the butt, but we made it work, y’all.

Knowing that we wanted to keep it low budget and needed it to be as easy as possible for only two people to do, we sat down and created the entire plan and shopping list on one of my lunch breaks. From there, we ordered everything we possibly could online. We purchased almost everything else from Party City and Walmart in one afternoon while my husband was working. My mom made one final trip the day before the party to get the food items and anything else we forgot or missed.

We were able to use a room at our church that had tan walls and tile floor; it was a pretty casual and basic styled room, so it fit well with the vibe of most of the buildings in PUBG. Once we had our space, we started with the basic decorations and expanded from there.

We knew we were going to have approximately thirty people and we would a place for them to sit and eat. We used four 8ft tables to make two rows (two tables per row) with a total of 32 chairs. Instead of table cloths, we decided to use blue tarps that we found at Walmart for just a couple bucks each.

(The tarps were labeled as 6ft x 8ft , but once we got them out of their packaging and spread them on the tables, we found that they were all different and off-measurement but about an inch or so. They were super cheap and served their purpose well enough, but if you prefer uniformity in your decor and want everything exact, we suggest getting the higher-end tarps or verifying the measurements before purchase/use).

The white wooden table was already in the room we were using, and we liked the rough look of it, so we left it uncovered. We picked up some red and blue serving bowls in assorted sizes (from the Dollar Tree) to hold chips and popcorn. We decided to break up the color scheme a tad bit here by adding yellow plates, cups, and napkins (Party City) to tie in the color of the game’s logo and some posters that we made (shown later).

Behind the table, there was a counter full of department supplies and other items that we wanted to hide, so using some metal columns we had laying around on campus and a $10 roll of black plastic sheeting (Home Depot), we made a makeshift cover. Although it probably looked like we were prepping the room so we could murder someone with a quick clean up, it worked well for the industrial style we were going for, and then we just threw a couple streamers on it for fun.

We wanted to incorporate snacks and food items that my husband loves, especially for gaming nights, but also feed 30 for brunch without breaking the bank.

We went with sandwich sliders on Hawaiian rolls as the main item, with a variety of ham and turkey with cheddar cheese, and provided bottles of mayonnaise and mustard so that the condiments were optional for everyone.

We filled the red bowls on the food table with nacho cheese Doritos and regular Lays chips, and also cut up a few watermelons. On the tables themselves, we put some blue bowls of popcorn and a surplus of Fruit Gushers for anyone who wanted to snack throughout the party.

My husband isn’t much of a traditional desert guy, so we decided to go with Rice Krispie treats instead, since he loves those. We sprayed them with red food coloring spray (Party City) to resemble the crates. Our initial plan was to melt the blue melting candies and dip the treats in them to resemble the tarp, but we found that they had a hard time sticking to the treats once we sprayed them with the red spray. Instead, we got some blue icing and drizzled it on the top so they weren’t just plain and red.

We kept the drinks easy and universally-liked, by providing jugs of filtered water and Milo’s sweet tea, as well as a cooler of lemonade.

Above the drink table, we wanted to use the large window space for something other than streamers, and wanted to bring more attention to fun of the game itself. So we got 5 white poster boards (Walmart) and used my mom’s Cricut vinyl machine to make these posters, using references or phrases often used in our squad.

There were a few bulletin boards nailed to the walls, with items on them that we didn’t want to mess with or move, so we decided to get a roll of brown paper and just cover them completely. We were able to cut the paper to size and pin them on the four corners of each board easily, and the paper blended well with the wall. But I had a little bit of extra time and happened to have some black paint on hand, so I messily painted some city names on them to tie them into the theme.

I wanted a small table to the side for people to place their cards and gifts, so we found a small round table on campus and used a red plastic tablecloth (Walmart) to cover it (which turned out to be a nice touch by resembling the red zone). I wrapped a cardboard box in another red plastic tablecloth, cut a square from an extra one of the blue tarps, secured it to the box with black ribbon, and cut a slit in the top through the top, turning it into a airdrop crate receptacle for cards or thoughtful notes.

The most time consuming part of the entire decorating process was the photo booth backdrop. It was simple, in theory, but just took so much time for one person.

Essentially, I just cut red strips of streamer to the desired height and taped them in a line across the wall. I repeated this with the blue streamer but made them shorter, and did them above the red, to create the tarp affect. I was satisfied with the result, but we didn’t use it enough to make it worth the time it took, honestly. I guess it really just depends on how selfie-prone your party goers are.

We wanted to do something different for the party favors, so I took some time to really pay attention to items in the game, especially the consumables. After brainstorming different ideas (the most difficult/ridiculous one we came up with was wrapping snack sized bags of chips in green plastic, sealing them, and labeling them like bandages, but that proved to be too waaay too much work) we decided to go with the painkillers!

Obviously, you can come across painkillers pretty often in the game, but we couldn’t just go around sending adults and children alike home from a birthday party with bottles full of pills, but nobody said anything about bottles full of Mike and Vikes. (My bad habit of quoting Archer at all the wrong right times finally came in handy.)

We ordered two 24-packs of empty pill bottles (https://amzn.to/2jJJjsY) and filled them with 25 candies each, and then my mom customized and printed the labels for them. Definitely one of my favorite parts of the whole party.

We also needed some prizes for a few games that we played, and wanted some favors to send home with our friends’ kids, so we made some miniature crates full of candy. We got red gift boxes (Party City – they only had rectangular ones, so we made them work. Had this not been a last minute idea, we would’ve ordered square ones), filled them with assorted candies, covered them with blue tissue paper, and drew on black lines with marker for the tarp ropes. They were quick and simple to put together, and were relatively inexpensive to make. The candy was purchased in bulk bags at Walmart.

Our final stage of planning was coming up with some fun games for everyone to play.

First, we played a trivia game with questions about my husband to find out who knew him best, which was fun and incredibly competitive.

Our second game was the standard donut party game, where you string donuts individually from a horizontal pole and have contenders attempt to eat the donuts off the strings without using their hands, which was fun and incredibly messy. To tie that game into the theme, I made “parachutes” out of green pipe cleaner for the donuts to hang from, and it actually turned out well, but apparently we forgot to get pictures of that.

Our final game, which the kids had a blast playing and re-playing for the rest of the party after the adults took their turns, was “pin the chicken on the pan”. My mom made the poster and printed it out, and then we printed and cut out a ton of little rotisserie chickens. We used double sided tape on the back, and standard bandanas as blindfolds to play the “pin the tail on the donkey” game with a PUBG twist!

Overall, the party was a success and an absolute blast. Thanks to my mom who helped with the entire plan and process, my dad and a few of our friends who showed up the day of to help her finish everything since I was the transporter, and to everyone who attended, we pulled off a total surprise and made my husband’s 25th birthday as fun and as special as we possibly could.

If you use any of these ideas for your own PUBG party, or come up with better ones, please feel free to share them with me here! I’d love to see them!