There are few things more fun than watching a bunch of children who are convulsing with laughter. The pop balloon game is almost guaranteed to get kids laughing: at themselves, at each other, at the dog. Whatever. The rules of the pop balloon game are simple enough: divide your children into two groups. The more the merrier. But 10 to 12 kids per group is ideal. Put two HUGE trash bags of colored balloons about 20 to 25 yards away. To make your life easier, split the balloons into 2 colors. Assign each color to their respective group.

Now comes the fun part. Blow your whistle and the first two children run to their respective bag of balloons. They each grab a balloon and must try to pop it by sitting on it or jumping on it. Whatever works! As soon as a child pops their balloon, the next child runs to the bag and so on and so forth until all the balloons are popped.  Divide guests into two equal groups. About 25 yards away place two bags of inflated balloons in colors to match your theme colors. These balloons should be over-inflated to make popping easier. At the sound of a ringing bell or whistle, the first two relay contestants, one from each team, run to the bag, and remove one balloon. Each must sit on it until it pops. Once the balloon pops, the players run back to the starting line, and tag the next player in line. The first team to complete the course wins. Not a quiet game for sure, but a guaranteed favorite among the kids!

The "adult" version of pop balloon is quite a hoot. Here's the difference: the two teams are split up to have one male and one female. When the whistle blows, a man and woman from their respective teams run and grab one balloon. But they have to put the balloon between them in order to pop balloon. And they have to face each other! And to make matters worse, they can only pop balloon at waist level! You can imagine the hilarity and the embarrassment. The other version is to pop balloon at chest level. This is also a lot of fun as you can imagine. But it's all in good fun.

The mid-level version of pop balloon has teenagers tie the balloons around their ankles and each team must try to step on the balloon of the opposing squad. A little more light weight but still a fan favorite.

At the other end of the spectrum for those who want to play balloon pop, is an internet game of pop balloon that is a type of word association game similar to "hangman". You may remember hangman from your youth: every time you miss a letter you get an item that ultimately creates a drawing of a stickman being hung at the gallows. It was a great game to do in the car on road trips. It's still good to play balloon pop when you have time to kill. The on-line version seems to be a big hit with kids. There are no less than 100 different versions of this game floating around. But because it is circulating on the web as "freeware", there's a risk of getting the game and a virus on your computer.

So to recap: there's the "real-time" version of pop balloon and the on-line version. Each has their fans. It just depends on what level of thrill you're looking for.