At their wedding last August, Joanne and Adrian Kimmok offered their 140 guests more than just the standard sit-down dinner and DJ.
Their reception, at Nanina’s in the Park in Belleville, New Jersey, the United States, featured interactive games led by the master of ceremonies, Ife Ade Tokan.
They included a dance competition and a couples’ challenge, where seven couples tried to identify their partners by voice while facing away from them and by touch while blindfolded.
The Kimmoks, based in Edgewater, New Jersey, decided to add these activities after seeing Tokan, who uses the stage name Ifektive, lead an integrated game show at a wedding in Marbella, Spain, the month before.
They were impressed with how everything "felt natural, fun and inclusive rather than awkward and forced”, said Joanne, 30, a strategy director in the beauty industry.
Games are "a great tool to get people engaged”, she said. Adrian, 32, a product marketing manager for a technology company, said he had especially enjoyed watching their guests "laughing together and running around the room together”.
Wedding industry professionals are reporting a rise in interest in wedding reception games. Lee Dyson, the owner of Hey Mister DJ in Los Angeles, has noticed a "shift in people’s desire for connection and for play” since the pandemic, he said.
It’s "still a slow build”, Dyson added, estimating that about 30% of wedding inquiries in 2025 asked about game-based activities.
Minted, which specialises in printed invitations and wedding websites, found that mentions of keywords like "game show”, "trivia” and "quiz”, rose 57% since last year on the websites it hosts.
The cost of hiring someone to host wedding games typically starts at around US$500 (RM1,952) and can go up to US$2,500 (RM9,762) or more.
For his wedding games and emcee package, Tokan charges US$3,500 (RM13,667) to US$6,000 (RM23,430).
Tokan estimates that 130 of the 150 weddings he has hosted since 2022 incorporated a game show element.
While certainly entertaining, he said, games make for "more expressive faces, which enable photographers and content creators to capture a range of emotions”.
This was true for Aliza Dworkind, a wedding photographer based in Montreal. On Nov 8, she shot the nuptials of Yvonne Huang, 32, an interior designer based in Toronto, and Michael Wong, 38, a mortgage underwriter, at Four Seasons Hotel Montreal.
Austin Tan of KNL Productions served as emcee, narrating a 10-minute scavenger hunt and musical chairs activity.
"I loved capturing this, as every guest can participate, whether running around or scrambling to find an item in your purse,” Dworkind said.
The couple’s festivities also included eight guests playing a shootout hockey match, a nod to Wong’s love of hockey, while the DJ played songs and instrumental pieces like The Hockey Theme by Dolores Claman and Coldplay’s Fix You, one of the walkout anthems for the Montreal Canadiens.
"The crowd was really into it,” Wong said.
Allison Richards, a nurse educator at UCLA, and Jian Guan, a neurosurgeon at Pacific Neuroscience Institute, both 31, of Los Angeles, wanted something different for their wedding at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, California, last October.
"We went to a wedding last spring where we didn’t know a single person, but they played a couple of interactive games and we felt it really opened up the whole room,” Richards said.
The couple hired Dyson to lead their 42 guests through a trivia game about their love story, played on guests’ phones with answers populated on a screen, and another round of general trivia, played with buzzers.
A third competition called the "happy couples” game pitted Richards and Guan against three other couples to see how well they knew their spouse.
"It flowed really nicely, and it broke up the usual wedding stuff,” said Richards, noting that the games took about an hour total, spread out over dinner and dancing.
To enhance the experience, the couple distributed fun-facts cards about themselves during the cocktail hour with tidbits of information later used for reference in the trivia contest.
The couples’ trivia winner was given the prize of selecting a charity to which the newlyweds donated US$1,000 (RM3,905) in their name.
"They didn’t think anyone would dance, and a point of pride is that the games got everyone so riled up we were able to pivot, and we got everybody dancing,” said Dyson, who started Let’s Play LA in 2020 when he transitioned during the pandemic to virtual game shows.
He had organised about 1,000 of these shows at various events from 2020-23, he said.
"Every wedding has dancing and a photo booth,” he said. "It’s just very cookie-cutter. So clients have been saying, 'How can we stand out?’”
They also serve as a "huge icebreaker”, Dyson added, especially since not everyone at a table may be acquainted with one another.
"Games can be a real bonding experience,” he said. "It gives everyone something to do other than being nervous about 'How am I going to carry a conversation at this table for 60 minutes with these people that I don’t know or potentially don’t like?’”
Trivia about the couple is Dyson’s most popular offering at wedding receptions. Other games he frequently plays are Name the Jam, Wedding Speech Bingo and 20-Second Challenge, where contestants spin a wheel and have 20 seconds to complete a task like pretending to be a robot or naming eight romantic comedies.
Whatever games a couple selects, Dyson said, it’s important to keep track of the time.
"The sweet spot range is 30 to 90 minutes,” he said.
His add-on packages typically cost US$1,000 (RM3,905) to US$2,500 (RM9,762) depending on the level of production – think projectors, buzzers, lighting, tech assistance.
Of course, it could be even more cost-effective if you wanted to do trivia the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
