Scrambled Egg Hunt Ideas

These three fun scrambled egg hunt ideas will have players of any age searching for scrambled up words in eggs to find prizes! There are options for kids, teens, and adults that are all so much fun people will be asking you to add a scrambled egg hunt to every Easter celebration!

Fun Scrambled Egg Hunt ideas for all Ages

Every year during our big family Easter celebration, I like to mix things up with different Easter games and Easter activities. We have all different ages, so I love to come up with ideas that everyone from the toddlers to the teens and even the adults can play!

This year we did this super fun scrambled egg hunt game in three different rounds – one for the little kids, one for the teens and tweens, and a more competitive one for the adults!

It was so much fun and a great addition to our traditional Easter egg hunts! Pretty sure it’s going to be a new annual tradition – I mean who doesn’t love playing games to win prizes!

So whether you’re looking for a traditional outdoor Easter egg hunt or indoor Easter egg hunt ideas, these three games would work great!

There are three different versions of this fun scrambled egg hunt you can play. They all start with hiding scrambled up letters in eggs but the games are all three played a little different.

Scrambled Egg Hunt Version 1

The first version of this game is in my opinion the most fun because it’s the most competitive and cutthroat. I like some good competition.

Egg Hunt Setup

Start by picking out prizes that have similar letters in their names that you think the group playing would like to win.

We did one prize per person playing but if you’re doing this with a bigger group of teens or adults, you could definitely do it so that not everyone gets a prize. Or just get a handful of the smallest prizes and anyone who doesn’t win one of the bigger prizes will win one of the smallest prizes.

If you need examples of prizes that have similar letters in their names, here are the ones we used:

• Cash
• Card
• Chance (we did lotto tickets for adults)
• Candy
• Carrot (there are lots of carrot treats!)
• Game

And if you want to add more to that, here are some others that use similar letters:

• Gum
• Charm
• Cake
• Mug
• Cup
• Can
• Make

You get the idea. Just make sure that you’re using similar letters so that when someone finds a letter, they can place it on a number of different items, not just one.

Once you’ve finalized your prizes, print or write out two copies of each of the items names you want to use. Once you have your copies, cut out each of the letters in one of the copies and place each of those letters into eggs by themselves (no other Easter egg fillers needed).

So for example, you would cut out the letters In C-A-S-H and place each of those letters in a different egg. Then repeat this with all of your words.

For the other copy of the words, cut out each individual word, keeping each individual word intact. You’ll be using these as labels for the prizes AND the place where players will be putting down the letters.

Next, it’s time to hide the Easter eggs. You can make these as easy or as difficult as you want, but I personally recommend making them easy-medium (not super easy and not difficult). You want people to be able to find the eggs so that they can win the prizes but you don’t want it to go SO fast that the game ends too quickly.

How to Do the Egg Hunt

After the eggs are hidden, it’s time for the hunt! Put all of the prizes on a table and tape their labels in front of them, making sure they’re spaced out enough that there is room between them.

When you say go, players have to go and find just one egg and bring it back to the table. When they bring it back, they have to immediately open the egg, find the letter inside, and place the letter on one of the labels (e.g., if they find an A, they can put the letter on top of the A in the word cash).

Once they’ve placed their letter, they have to go and find another egg and letter.

The person who places the final letter on a label (covering all of the letters) wins that prize. They take their prize and are out of the rest of the egg hunt while everyone else keeps hunting and trying to win their own prize.

This “whoever places the last letter” is what makes this game so fun because you have to make calculated decisions on where you want to put your letter and hope that you didn’t build the words up too much for someone else ot sneak in and win the prize first!

Keep hunting until all of the letters are found and everyone has won a prize or all of the prizes are gone.

Scrambled Egg Hunt 2

Okay so this version of the scrambled egg hunt game is very similar to the game above in setup but a little different in how it’s played and how the prizes are won!

How to Setup the Egg Hunt

Start in the same way by choosing prizes that have similar letters, just like the first version. We actually did the exact same prizes, just a different version of them.

Then create and print out THREE copies of the words. For the first version, you just need two copies – for this version you’ll want three copies.

Cut out the letters for two of the three copies and stuff them into Easter eggs. Cut out the words from the last copy to again, use as labels for the prizes.

Hide the eggs – easy to medium difficulty – with the letters and again setup a table with prizes and labels.

How to Play

Then when you say go, players have to go out and find eggs with the goal to find eggs with ALL of the letters for the prize they want to win.

The catch is that they can only have a certain number of eggs in their hands at any given time. That number is equal to the number of letters in the longest prize. For us, that number was six because one of our words was carrot with six letters. If you’re doing cash, game, cake, and card – you might only have people with four eggs at a time.

Players go out and find up to X number of eggs. As they find eggs, they can open them to see what letter is inside and if they want to keep that letter and egg they can. If they don’t want that letter and egg, they can put the letter back in and drop the egg back in the playing field and hunt for another one.

This game of finding eggs and looking for the letters continues until someone finds all of the letters for a prize on the table. Whoever puts down all of the letters for a given prize first wins the prize – bad luck to anyone who was collecting those letters but didn’t win it, they’ll have to start trying for something else.

Once someone wins a prize, they’re out of the egg hunt. Keep hunting and playing until everyone has won a prize or until all of the prizes are gone.

Scrambled Egg Hunt 3

This last version is less a game and more just a fun way to mix up your annual Easter egg hunt by adding a prize for the kids to earn during the hunt.

Egg Hunt Setup

Start by figuring out what you want your prize to be then come up with a word to describe it.

For example, if you’re going to give them a stuffed animal, the word might be animal. If you’re giving them some Hot Wheel cars, your word might be cars.

I recommend keeping the word fairly simple if you’re going to have them unscramble it – if you’re going to have the word written out and they just have to find the letters to win it, you can keep it a little more challenging (like penguin instead of animal for a stuffed penguin).

Cut up the letters and put them into the eggs along with other Easter egg fillers and then hide the eggs just like normal.

How to Do the Egg Hunt

Then just tell the kids that they need to find the letters and then unscramble them (or not) to win their prize. If you’re doing different prizes for different kids, I recommend hiding different color eggs for each kid so they don’t have to figure out which letters are theirs.

Or just have one big group prize they can share (like bubbles or a game or even a plate full of Easter Oreos or Easter haystacks).

Once they’ve found all of their eggs, they have to unscramble the letters to figure out what kind of prize they won. Or if you’d prefer to show them ahead of time, they need to go through their eggs to find all of the letters.

Once they’ve found all the letters (and unscrambled them or not), they win the prize!

And that’s it – three fun egg hunt ideas that would work for any age! You can use them to amp up your Easter egg hunts or as an activity to do after the traditional egg toss!

If you like these fun scrambled egg hunt ideas, make sure to check out these other fun Easter games!

• Printable Easter egg scavenger hunt – a fun idea for any egg hunt!
• Easter egg hunt clues – tons of clues you can use to hide and find Easter eggs!
• Easter egg hunt for teens – a great egg hunt that’s perfect for teens or anyone who can text!
• Easter bunny hunt – have kids searching for bunnies instead of eggs in a different type of hunt!
• Easter memory – a printable version of an Easter egg hunt, finding matches instead of eggs!