The drinks reception sounds like the easy part of the wedding to plan. The ceremony is over, there’s something cold to drink, and everyone has a chance to catch up before dinner. You might be looking forward to it as much as any other part of the day.
Then you work through the photographs you want: both families, grandparents, the wedding party, a few of just the two of you. You realise you’ll be busy for quite a lot of it. Your guests, meanwhile, have an hour or more to themselves.
Plenty will be happy catching up with people they haven’t seen for ages. Others might only know you, or the person they’ve come with. When you’re planning what happens between the ceremony and the wedding breakfast, it’s worth thinking about both. Food, somewhere comfortable to sit and a few optional things to do can go a long way.
Work out how much time you actually have
Go through your photo list with your photographer before you settle the timings. Allow for getting everyone to the right place, especially if you’re moving between venues. Ask your venue when guests need to be called through for dinner, too: seating a roomful of people takes time.
That should give you a clearer idea of what you’re planning for. Forty-five minutes can pass quite happily with drinks and canapés. If you’ve allowed two hours, you’ll want to think a bit more about food, seating and something for guests to do while you’re away.
Put the meal time on your order of the day. It helps people pace themselves, particularly anyone who had an early lunch or missed it in the rush to get ready.
Start with food and somewhere to sit
Before booking entertainment, talk to your caterer about what guests will eat during the drinks reception and when it will come out. If there’s a long wait until the wedding breakfast, ask whether the canapés you’ve chosen will be enough. This is easier to judge with the menu and timings in front of you than by picking a number of canapés in isolation.
Think about how the food will reach people, too. If guests are spread between a terrace, garden and indoor bar, check that all three will be covered. Make water and soft drinks easy to find.
Have seats available from the start, including some in the shade if you’re outside. Anyone in uncomfortable shoes will appreciate them. A few small tables are useful as well; eating a canapé while holding a drink and a clutch bag takes more coordination than it should.
Choose activities people can join halfway through
Guests will come and go for photographs, head to the bar or stop for a conversation. Anything you put on during this part of the day needs to allow for that.
Lawn games suit this well. Boules, croquet or giant Jenga can be left out for people to try when they feel like it. Put them somewhere visible, with a couple of chairs nearby for anyone who’d enjoy watching. Check where they’ll go if it rains before you hire them.
You can also leave a few conversation prompts beside the guest book. Asking for a suggestion for your first anniversary, or a prediction about where you’ll be living in ten years, gives guests something more specific to write than “congratulations”. You get something fun to read afterwards, too.
Pick what suits your guests and the space. There’s no need to hire several different things just because you have a long drinks reception, especially if the people you’ve invited are likely to spend most of it talking.
A short quiz or a shared photo album
A wedding quiz can work here if people can answer a few questions whenever they’re ready. Keep the first round short and include questions that guests can have a reasonable guess at, even if they don’t know you well. A childhood photo to identify gives people more to discuss than an obscure date.
QuizYourGuests is a free option for this. Guests join on their phones using a QR code, and rounds open and close at times you set beforehand, with automatic scoring. You could open one during the drinks reception and save another for later in the day. Put a short explanation beside the code so guests know what they’re joining.
A shared photo album is another option, particularly if you’d like pictures from the parts of the reception you miss. A sign by the guest book can invite people to upload theirs. Give it a try beforehand so you know what guests will need to do, and check the venue’s Wi-Fi or mobile reception if either activity depends on it.
Leave room for conversation
For guests who rarely get together, the chance to talk may be the best entertainment you could offer. Keep that in mind when choosing music and deciding where musicians or speakers will go. People should be able to hear each other without shouting, and it’s helpful to have somewhere quieter to sit.
The same applies to games. Leave them available, let people know they’re there, and let guests decide whether to join in. Someone spending the whole reception chatting with an old friend is having a perfectly good time.
Make time to enjoy it yourselves
Tell your photographer if spending time at the drinks reception matters to you. They can help you work out which group shots you want and whether some photographs could happen at another point in the day.
If you’re still putting the whole day together, this wedding reception timeline with suggested times for games and activities gives you a starting point to adapt with your venue and suppliers.
And ask someone to save you a plate of canapés. You’ve chosen the food and invited all these people; allow yourselves some time to eat and catch up with them, too.
Marek Li-Ventur is the founder of QuizYourGuests, a free wedding quiz guests can play on their phones. He built it for his own wedding to help two groups of guests who had never met get talking. He lives in London.
