Cars Theme Party Ideas, Games and Table Decor

Like most boys his age, my son is big time into cars and Pixar’s Cars is his favorite movie. The ‘Cars’ themed party I threw for his 4th birthday was a huge hit. I am sharing all my ideas for the invitation, decor, table setting, cake, games and return gifts in this blog post.

Planning

I was heavily pregnant at the time of planning this party and wanted to take things easy. It is surprising how quickly a cars themed party comes together. My only purchases for the party were:

1. A Cars themed Single Bedsheet with Pillow Cover (You will see how I used it)
2. Cars themed paper napkins, flag banner and water cups
3. Cars themed Straw cups for Return Gifts
4. Hot Wheels assortment of cars for Return Gifts
5. Invitations and Some Banners from Vistaprint (which I designed myself)
6. A Cars themed cake from my Local Bakery

Invitations

The invitations were in the form of ‘Pit Passes’ and each invitation carried the name of the guests as ‘Crew Members’.

Vistaprint has a ready-to-use design of the race track with the cars. I added some characters from the movie and my personal details to personalize them.

Decoration

The decoration for this party is very simple if you have a Cars fan in your family. There are sure to be plenty of tiny cars lying around the house like mine. I decided to use them and created a focal point by decorating my mantel. It makes it easier to decorate one particular space as opposed to little bits around the room. The rest of the room was filled by balloons and tissue paper pom poms.

I turned the mantel into a highway street using black trash bags. I made a runner using folded trash bags and painted the divider line using yellow acrylic paint. Some cars were placed on the ‘street’ while the others were lined up at the side.

I use Vistaprint for most of my decorating needs. I design (using ready made images online) banners according my theme and get them printed out. For the cars themed party, I decorated with a Cars themed banner with my son’s name on it along with his favorite characters from the movie – Lightning McQueen and Mator. I also got a ‘traffic signal’ printed out.

Cars were placed everywhere and specially displayed was this ‘Lightning McQueen’ art made by my daughter. Her talent in art makes me so proud of her!

Cars Themed Table (Refuel Station)

The little kids ‘refueled’ themselves at this cute table.

The table was set up for the kids in the same theme. I used the single bedsheet mentioned in the beginning, as a table cloth. Again, I fashioned a ‘runner’ using black trash bags with strokes of yellow paint. I had red and white popcorn cups left over from another party. Cars themed plastic cups and paper napkins made the setting livelier.

I set a ‘Refuel’ sign on the table. The sign was also printed on the side of one of the banners I got from Vistaprint which I cut out and used separately. Of course, I had planned the design beforehand and created the banner accordingly.

Cars themed Birthday Cake

I wanted a race track cake and my husband wanted to feature the ‘Piston Cup’ from the movie. So, we settled for this design.

The Piston Cup was made of fondant and the cake was a checkerboard cake from the inside. The checkered theme continued when the cake was cut and there were a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the kids on the seeing the checkerboard design 🙂

By the time the cake was cut, the ‘Cars’ logo was displaced by the kids wanting to touch it. But it did not matter – not even to the birthday boy!

Party Games

We had guests of ages 2 to 15 so I avoided games involving skill. We played the classic ‘Pin the Tail’ by converting it to ‘Pin the Wheel on Lightning McQueen’. For this, I used the pillow case that came with the bed sheet. I taped it to the wall and cut out black circles for the wheel. Each ‘wheel’ had double sided tape on it. I would remove the tape backing and hand the wheel to the child whose turn it was.

The next game was a superhit! We had to have a racing game at a Cars party so I used an idea seen at a School fete. I created a race track using chalk on black paper (taped to the ground). All the guests received one Hot Wheels car each for the game which was theirs to keep, of course.

Then, using a large foam dice, we raced the cars like a board game. Everyone took turns throwing the dice and the car would go ahead the number of places the rolled dice showed. But it was not that simple! There was a set of rules that you had to play according to.