I want to play a game involving helium balloons. Maybe a reverse scavenger hunt? Each team would have a dozen balloons, a list of targets (’man in red shirt’, ‘child with ice-cream’), and the first team to give all their balloons away to appropriate targets would be the winner.

My concerns with this:

Score verification. To make sure people don’t just let the balloons go, there’d need to be a way to make sure that they’ve given them to appropriate recipients. The obvious solution to this is photographs: give your balloon to someone in a red shirt, take a photo of them, bring the photos back at the end for judging. However, it’s presumably harder and more awkward to give a balloon to someone and persuade them to be in a photograph than it is to just give them a balloon; and this is probably especially the case with children, the group most likely to appreciate random balloons. Asking someone whether you can give their toddler a balloon and take a photo seems likely to be awkward.

Annoyed passers-by. What if there’s only one person in a red shirt, and they don’t want a balloon? They could get every team, potentially every team member, trying to foist a balloon on them. Making it possible for passers-by to be more than scenery seems like a good thing for a game to do, but annoying them incessantly with balloons is less good. The ideal playing space would be somewhere like the South Bank, where there won’t be too many people in a hurry to get to an autopsy, but even so.

I’ll go down to the South Bank with some balloons and try to give them away, to see how it goes, but: any solutions? Any different ideas for a big balloon game? It’s worth noting that deliberately letting go of balloons may count as littering, depending on where it’s done (though it sounds like it’s okay in the UK as long as they’re biodegradable balloons, released in numbers under 5000, and don’t have string or tags attached).