We did a carnival for our daughter's fifth birthday. She had been to a family fun sort of play games and win prizes place and we wanted to duplicate that at home as much as we could.  Our budget was $100, and we spent about half of that on prizes at the dollar store and oriental trading company, including prize tickets for redemption, and the other half on food.  We had 12 kids and 11 adults. INVITATIONS - We just sent out emails. GAMES - The games were all homemade - we threw bean bags in a bucket, bean bag tic tac toe, penny pitch (throw pennies at dots on the ground), knock em down (bean bags thrown at cups lined up on a board), ring toss (canning rings around pop bottles), and a duck pond (little duckies in a kids wading pool, kids caught one and got whatever amount of tickets were written on the bottom).  I made the bean bags with the kids (they loved it!) and made a little shoulder bag for each kid that was coming that had their tickets in it. They used it during the games and then filled it with prizes at the end.  The kids paid" for the games with red tickets and won blue tickets playing that they could redeem for prizes. Also because I was recruiting parents as they showed up to help me run the games I had a basket for each station that had the necessary pieces (beanbags pennies etc) and a baggie of blue tickets in it so I could just hand it to the parent and let them go for it.  PARTY SNACKS - We had a concession stand with corndogs popcorn nachos pulled pork sandwiches lemonade juice boxes watermelon and popsicles. I found little cardboard trays like they use at real carnivals at costco and they made it feel more authentic. The cake was cupcakes cooked in ice cream cones with frosting piped on top.  We also had glitter tattoos that the kids could get applied during the carnival too (we just limited it to two per kid).    DECORATIONS - We decorated with crepe paper and made signs for each of the games explaining how to play. We separated the booths by streamers had a few balloons up and covered tables with solid red tablecloths. We all had a really good time. All the kids loved playing the games and we had kids ranging from 2 to 13. The parents helping to run the games were pretty generous and the kids loved that.  We played for the first hour (we gave each kid 20 tickets) broke for dinner and then gave the kids 10 additional tickets at the end.  We tried to do as much as we could homemade and it felt like one big craft project.  Nobody felt like this was a cheap party at all and we had just as much fun as many more really expensive options. It was a lot of work but doing a little bit at a time we were well prepared and just had to set up on the day of the party."