How to Host a Eurovision Party (2027 Guide)

Half your guests have tracked the national finals since January. The other half will ask, mid-song, which one is Moldova. A good Eurovision party has to work for both, and the show makes it easy: big performances, voting drama, staging choices that demand commentary.

What separates a good night from one people still mention in July is mostly logistics. Voting is the one that goes wrong most often, so start there.

Set Up Voting Before Anything Else

Shouting numbers at one person holding a spreadsheet is the worst way to run a party vote. Phone voting takes about two minutes to set up and removes the one chore that makes someone miss half the show.

With ScoreJudge, the setup looks like this:

1. Create a competition in Audience Ranking mode. Guests drag the acts into their own order, and points are assigned for them.
2. Add the competing countries as entries.
3. Put the QR code on your TV between acts. Guests scan it and rank from their phone.
4. Show the live leaderboard on the big screen, then reveal the final result after the last act.

No app downloads and no accounts for your guests. Results update as ballots come in.

Two things worth knowing before the night:

• The official contest has 25 or 26 acts in the Grand Final, and ranking all of them on a phone is a chore. Points go to the top ten by default (12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, just like the real thing), so guests only need to place their favorites near the top.
• The free plan covers up to 25 voters per competition. A big house party can go past that, and a paid plan raises the limit.

Set the competition up the day before and vote on it yourself from a phone. You don't want to be debugging a QR code while the first act is already on stage.

Food: One Dish Per Country

The best strategy is the lazy one. Assign each guest a country and ask them to bring something from it. You end up with a table like this, and you cooked almost none of it:

If you'd rather control the menu, a shopping list that covers the continent:

• Sweden: meatballs (frozen IKEA ones are fine, nobody's judging)
• France: baguette and a cheese board with brie, camembert and comté
• Italy: bruschetta or a caprese platter
• Spain: olives, manchego, chorizo
• Greece: hummus and pita, dolmades from the deli counter
• Germany: pretzels and mustard

If you only cook one thing, make it a big batch of something from the host country. Look up where the contest is being held and go from there. Fondue works for Switzerland because it doubles as entertainment, but a host country with an easier signature dish is a gift.

For drinks, wine from a competing country is cheap and thematic. Name one cocktail after your favorite act. For the non-drinkers, sparkling water with fruit, labeled "12 Points Punch", looks like effort and takes ten seconds.

Decorations: More Is More

Eurovision is not the event for minimalism. You need very little to get there:

• Flag bunting across the room. Pre-made European flag bunting sets beat printing 30 flags yourself.
• Fairy lights for the stage glow. Warm white or colored sets are all you need.
• Small country flags on cocktail sticks stuck into the food, so people can find the Greek dish without asking.
• Score cards with 1 to 12 printed in large type. Guests hold them up after each song for impromptu scoring, and they're a good backup if the Wi-Fi dies.

Costumes

Pick the dress code that matches your friends, not the one that looks best on a mood board.

"Dress as a country" works when you've assigned countries in advance. It ranges from a striped shirt for France to full national costume. "Eurovision glam" is the safe default: sequins, glitter, feather boas, star-shaped sunglasses, and everyone slightly overdressed for a living room. "Come as your favorite act of all time" is for die-hard groups only. Expect at least one ABBA and one Conchita Wurst.

If you're unsure, go with glam. Nobody has ever felt out of place wearing too much glitter to this event.

Games

The drinking game

A Eurovision drinking game is practically mandatory. These rules are reliable:

• Sip when a wind machine appears, someone does an unnecessary key change, or a performer removes a layer of clothing.
• Drink when the pyrotechnics malfunction, the interval act is baffling, or someone votes for their neighbor.
• Finish your drink when the green room camera catches someone looking devastated.

Pace yourselves. The show runs over three hours, and the voting is at the end.

Bingo and predictions

Print bingo cards with squares like "barefoot performance", "prop violin", "dramatic cape removal" and "surprise rapper". First full row wins.

For the prediction contest, everyone writes down a top three before the show starts. Closest to the real result wins. It's the best way to keep guests invested in songs they don't love, because everyone has a stake in a country they've never visited. You can also run it as a second ranked-voting competition in ScoreJudge and compare the two at the end.

On the Night

Before the show, get the food out, put the voting QR code on the TV, and hand out the score cards. Brief the "wait, what is Eurovision?" guests on how points work and what douze points means, or send them our explainer on how Eurovision voting works beforehand.

During the show, give everyone about 60 seconds after each act to place their vote. Put the live leaderboard up between songs, and read out the standings every few acts to build tension.

After the last act, close voting and reveal your party's winner on the big screen next to the official result. Did your living room agree with the juries? With the televote? With neither? That argument is the best part of the night.

What Ranked Voting Looks Like in Practice

Since Audience Ranking launched in the spring, people have set up around 680 ranked-voting competitions on ScoreJudge. About 200 of them collected any votes at all. The rest were test runs and setups nobody got round to using, which is what you'd expect from a tool people try the day before an event.

The ones that did get votes are small. Half had two voters or fewer, and only about one in six reached ten. Lineups of 20 or more entries, the actual Eurovision shape, were a rare exception: the typical ranked vote has around five entries.

Two things follow if you're running the full Eurovision list. First, you're in less-trodden territory than most users, so test it. Second, it's another reason to let guests rank only their top ten.

The One Rule

Don't take it seriously. The point of Eurovision is that it's gloriously, unapologetically extra. The best parties lean into that: bad accents during the voting, passionate arguments about staging, genuine emotional investment in a song you'd never play outside this context.

Set up the voting, put out the food, hang the flags. Eurovision does the rest.

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