Every group party follows the same arc. Somebody offers to host, everybody offers to bring something, the offers happen across four different conversations, and on the night you have three bags of cups, no ice, and a serving bowl shortage nobody predicted.
The supply list is the easy half. The hard half is that six people are shopping from six different mental copies of it.
Decor
- Lighting first — this does more than anything else on the list. Orange or purple bulbs, string lights, battery tea lights
- A fog machine if you are committing, plus fog fluid, which is a separate purchase people forget
- Cobwebs, spiders, window silhouettes
- Door and porch decor, since half the effect happens before anyone comes inside
- Black tablecloths — cheap, and they hide everything
- Battery candles rather than real ones, in a house full of costumes
Food and drink
- Cups, plates, napkins, utensils. Buy more than the guest count; people lose cups
- A marker so people label their cup, which cuts the count in half
- Ice, and something to put it in. Consistently the most forgotten item at any party
- Serving bowls and platters. The usual shortage
- Drink dispenser if you are doing punch
- Bottle opener, corkscrew, tongs, serving spoons
- Trash bags and a second trash can. Two bins beats one overflowing one
Games and activities
- Prizes for a costume contest, even small ones — it changes how many people dress up
- A speaker, and a playlist downloaded rather than streamed
- Whatever your group actually plays, bought in advance rather than found in a closet
The unglamorous half
- Paper towels and cleaning spray, staged before people arrive
- Stain remover, because of the punch
- Extension cords for the lighting and the fog machine
- Somewhere for coats
- Toilet paper. Genuinely, check
Splitting it without a spreadsheet
Build the list once and share the link instead of the list. On MakerManifest each item comes from a product page, so "string lights" becomes the specific ones at the specific length — which matters when two people are buying lighting and you would rather it matched.
Use the note on each item as the claim field: "Jordan is bringing", "bought", "still needed", "getting from the party store on Saturday". It is not a task manager and does not need to be. It is one page that is current, unlike a group chat, which is thirty messages with the answer buried in the middle.
Publish it, drop the link in the chat. Nobody needs an account and nobody installs anything — it opens as a web page on a phone. That is the whole reason it works at party-planning scale.
One limitation to know: guests cannot check items off themselves, so you edit the list as offers come in. It is on the roadmap. For six people it is a non-issue.
Reuse it next year
Most of a party list is the same every year — the cups, the lighting, the trash bags. Open last year's, swap the theme items, republish. The genuinely useful part is the notes you left about what ran out.
If you would rather the dashboard stayed simple, pick the Just lists experience at signup — what that changes.
Build your party list free and buy ice exactly once.