6 Things Every Bachelorette Game Pack Gets Wrong When There Are Two Brides

If you go shopping for bachelorette games as though you are planning a party for two brides, you will notice something within about 10 minutes. Filter for "lesbian," "sapphic," or "LGBTQ" — whatever the shop will let you type into the box — and then actually read the cards.

They break. They break every time, and they break in the same six places. Here they are, worst to least-worst, along with what you can do about each one.

1. The groom is load-bearing

I don't mean that the groom gets mentioned somewhere. I mean that he is load-bearing: if you pull him out of the game, the whole thing collapses, because he was the entire mechanic. "Guess how he proposed." "How many exes did he have?" "Rank his worst habits."

You can't Sharpie your way out of this one, and unfortunately it is the one that matters most (it is usually the centerpiece game of the whole night). The fix is a format built for two protagonists instead of one. If both brides answer the same questions separately beforehand, the room gets to compare the answers side by side — same energy, twice the payoff, and nobody is left out. (I broke that format down properly in the games guide, where it is called She Said / She Said.)

2. "Bride" is singular in nineteen different places

The pack technically works. However, every single card says the bride, and there are two of them standing right there in the room. So all night long somebody is reading a card out loud and doing that little verbal stumble: "the bride… sorry, Sam… I mean, both of you…" — and that happens on 30 or 40 separate cards!

It is a small thing. It is also constant, and small-and-constant is exactly how you make somebody feel like a guest at her own party. If you are the one hosting, read every card out loud once the day before and pencil in the names. That is 20 minutes of work (with a pencil, at your kitchen table), and the difference it makes is BIG.

3. Find-and-replace isn't design

You can always tell when it has happened. The listicle promises "27 Lesbian Bachelorette Ideas," and then idea number 14 is still "hire a male stripper (she'll love it!)." Somebody ran find-and-replace on a 2019 post and shipped it.

The tell is usually the pictures. If the cover photo shows two women and the actual cards are covered in clip-art top hats and mustaches (yes, really), believe the cards.

4. They assume one squad

Almost every game on the market is written for one friend group who all already know each other. At a two-bride party you very often have two groups meeting for the first time, and the games are the ONLY structured thing standing between you and 90 minutes of polite small talk in kitchen corners.

Honestly, this is the biggest missed opportunity in the whole category. A game that doubles as an icebreaker does two jobs at once, and there are easy versions of it: bingo cards with squares like "find someone who was at their first date," or team trivia where each squad has to answer questions about the other bride. Nobody sells that. Everybody needs it.

5. The humor punches at the couple instead of with them

A great deal of bachelorette content rests on a single joke, and the joke is that marriage is a prison and this is your last night of freedom.

If that is your friend group's sense of humor, go for it — genuinely! However, it lands differently for a couple who spent a while not being allowed to do this at all. The best games make the brides feel adored, not hazed. Spice is wonderful, spice should always be optional, and if you are hosting you should pull any card that will land wrong in your room before the game starts rather than during it.

6. Nothing leaves anything behind

You spend somewhere between $12 and $40, you play for an hour, and then the cards go in the recycling.

The games that people actually remember are the ones that produce an artifact: a superlatives ballot that everybody signed, mad-lib vows that turned out accidentally beautiful, a video of both brides answering the same 10 questions in two different rooms (that one costs you $0 and a phone). It costs almost nothing to do, and almost nobody does it. DO it.

Summary

• Five of these six problems are fixable in about ten minutes, with a pen and a read-through the night before.
• Number one isn't fixable. If the groom is the mechanic, you need a different game, not a different pronoun.
• Read the cards before you buy, and believe the cards over the cover photo.
• If two friend groups are meeting for the first time, choose games that double as icebreakers.
• Leave something behind — a ballot, a video, a keepsake somebody will screenshot for years.

If you would rather have the actual games than the complaints, here are nine that work for two brides.