Enchanted Princess in Saint Kitts

Cruise ships have daily schedules with all sorts of different activities passengers can choose to watch or participate in depending on the activity or game. Trivia is popular and common, but far from the only game available on cruise ships.

Enchanted Princess offered quite a variety of games in various areas of the ship. The central area called the Piazza hosted things like cornhole, giant Jenga, egg drop and a paper airplane contest.

trivia at Princess Live

Princess Live, a small stage near the center of the ship, often held trivia contests during the day, but in the evening they switched to game shows like one called Yes or No.

Other games were held in various areas of the ship. Sometimes the same game might be in a different venue one day than it was another like carpet bowling which was in the Vista Lounge one time and a lounge called Take 5 another. The Vista Lounge has comedy in the evenings and other activities during the day. Take 5 often hosted private functions since it was fully enclosed unlike many of the ship’s other venues.

cornhole in the piazza

We don’t usually participate much in the onboard games on our cruises, but on Enchanted Princess we tried quite a few. Mainly due to a couple unexpected sea days when scheduled port stops got cancelled due to stormy weather. Or so they said. It was quite stormy the day we were to go to Princess Cays. So much so that ships who had gone to ports in the area that day ended up either damaging themselves and the dock they were tied to or having to leave early before all the passengers were back onboard. Missing that port was a good call. At Dominica on the other hand the water appeared dead calm around the pier that they insisted had too much of a swell for them to dock so people figured they were just spooked by what happened with other ships on that very stormy day a couple days prior to that port stop.

The egg drop was something John wanted to try anyway, not having anything to do with cancelled port stops. He’d done something similar in school and figured he had a good plan. We saw it on the schedule one day, but when we went to the piazza it turned out just to be sign-ups with the actual contest planned for the last sea day.

chicken man signs people up for the egg drop

After signing up people had the time between then and the contest to make something that will keep a raw egg from breaking when dropped 2 stories into the piazza. A man in a chicken suit handled the registration. On the day of the competition he handed out the eggs and took any last-minute participants. They do not provide anything other than the egg. Contestants have to find the parts to make their contraptions as well as having their own idea for it.

the Effy bag wins for design

When the day came the man in the chicken suit ran the game while a girl was the announcer. First everyone lined up and showed off their creations. The design with the loudest applause got a medal, which was an Effy jewelry bag with air-filled gloves hanging out the top. Other contestants had a man-bag full of bread with the egg in the middle, a pretty little pouch with a garbage bag parachute, a couple last-minute entries consisting of a shoe with the egg wrapped in socks for one and a paper cup for the other. John’s was a cardboard box which had the egg suspended in panty hose in the center plus some air-filled bags and gloves under it. It turned out not to be just a matter of the egg surviving the fall. There was also a target.

parachute coming down

The target looked like a giant fried egg. The winner would be the unbroken egg landing closest to the yolk. Chicken man checked each entry after it landed to see how the egg fared. The Effy bag, shoe, and cup had broken eggs. Of the others the parachute was the only one that actually landed on the target, so she won.

John’s egg didn’t break

For the paper airplane contest each person wanting to participate made their own paper airplane or whatever from the paper provided. The first part involved throwing them from a balcony one deck up and trying to make them go through a hoop. More of them went spiraling down or straight down than anything. One only went as far as the ledge of the balcony it was thrown from and got stuck there. Others flew astray. Several barely missed the hoop. Only one made it through and it was some sort of weird circular thing rather than an actual airplane. Mine flew the farthest, but it was off-course and not through the hoop. The second part was trying to land them on a little runway from the same deck it was on. Several planes landed on the runway so the closest one to the end won. Again a lot of them failed to fly at all, just dropping to the ground from where they were thrown. Others (like mine again) flew well, but not in a straight line and not to the runway.

carpet bowling

We saw carpet bowling on the schedule on the day that was scheduled to be a port day at Princess Cay, but turned into a sea day when stormy weather cancelled that port. Having never heard of carpet bowling before we went to see what that was all about. They had some funny little black balls bigger than pool balls, but smaller than croquet balls that had a color dot on one side. They were not totally round and would turn away from the color dot eventually when rolled. The object was to end up with your ball closest to a little white ping-pong sized ball. The first person each of 4 teams of 2 people took a turn to roll. One ball, one chance per person. After one person from each team went the second one had a go. It didn’t matter if one ball hit another or even knocked the little white ball somewhere else. Just which ball ended up closest to the white one at the end. It would take more than one or two throws to figure out exactly how hard to roll the ball to get it anywhere near where you want it to go. Too light of a throw and it curves off long before getting anywhere near, but too hard and it passes it by and slams into the door or wall beyond the target. Probably a lot of dents in that area from that game. Most people were way off, but one lady seemed to have the hang of it. We were nowhere close. They played two games and in the first one I threw too hard and in the second one too light. Didn’t find that happy medium. It was fun though. Each game had 2 rounds in which the winners of the first round moved onto a final round and everyone else was eliminated. Winners of the championship round got a medal. Then they started fresh for the second game.

They had that game again another day. Take 5 had a lot more open space for the balls to roll in without hitting anything so it was a better place for it than the Vista Lounge had been. A lot more people came that day so there were more people on each team as well as more teams.  Afterword they had a silent trivia in the same room where people just wrote in answers on a sheet of questions sitting on a table by a box of pencils. You just handed in the paper. As far as I know there were no prizes or anything for that. One of the questions was what do you call a group of crows. I told the guy running it, which was the same one who did the carpet bowling, that ravens would be better because everybody knows about a murder of crows, but not so many have heard of an unkindness of ravens. He hadn’t known that either, but said he’d use it for a future question.

bowling with a giant beach ball

Carpet bowling wasn’t the only strange sort of bowling Enchanted Princess had. One day there was bowling in the piazza with oversized pins and a giant ball that looked more like a beach ball than a bowling ball. All of which were much lighter weight than regular bowling things. Probably all of the blow-up sort. A lot of people signed up to play. We each knocked down some pins, which was better than many people who didn’t get any. One lady was ahead of the pack with more pins than anyone else. She would have won, but then the guy running the game let people who didn’t sign up have a turn – except they had to throw the ball with their back facing the pins. One guy managed to tie the lady in number of pins so facing backwards he did better than everyone but her. They had a tie-breaker bowl off and he won.

tossing chopsticks in the 60-second frenzy

Later the same afternoon of the first carpet bowling we checked out something called 60-second frenzy in the piazza. The first round of this involved 8 chopsticks set out in a line. You have one minute to pick up the first one, balance it on the back of your hand, toss it up, and then catch it – underhand not allowed. After catching the first one you then add the second one, do both together, and then work your way down the line so on the last toss you have all 8. If you drop any you pick them back up and try that number again until either getting through all of them or running out of time. For a long time nobody was successful. Finally a guy named Gary got them all. Then nobody got past 7. I was the last one on the list and it was still just Gary. Everyone else had put the sticks on the back of their hand, but I put them on my fingers because you can spread those wider for better balance and also don’t have to toss the sticks as far before catching them. I got through most of them fine, but did drop one somewhere along the line and had to pick it up and do that toss over. Finally got to the last 8 and caught them before the countdown to the last second ended. It was just me and Gary at that point so the guy running the game asked if anyone who hadn’t signed up wanted to try. One lady who was the mother of a failed contestant got talked into giving it a go and was successful using my technique.

catching chopsticks in the 60-second frenzy

Then he asked if anyone wanted to try again. Someone named Gladys tried also using my technique, but her sticks were still going all over the place and she ran out of time even though the guy running it kept picking them up for her. John was the only other person to give it a second chance. He got nearly there, but had to get that last 8. Time was running out so the guy in charge kept repeating the same number on the countdown until he got it with about 5 extra seconds that hadn’t been counted.

second chance

Apparently that was because they needed at least 4 people for the second round since it went in teams of 2. Beer-pong style we bounced ping-pong balls into a cup, trading back and forth between each person on the team. I guess they could have just had me and Gary each do that on our own without a partner though. Once a ball went in another cup got stacked on top until the total stack was 7 cups with 7 balls. We were only up to 5 cups with balls in them when the other 2 finished so we got second place. They got wine stoppers for first and we got coasters for second so nobody got a medal. John was bummed about that. He really wanted one since he hadn’t won a cruise ship medal before. I won one on a previous Princess cruise for a perfect landing in the middle of the runway in the paper airplane contest, which went a lot better for me on that ship than on this one.

passengers vs officers cornhole

They had cornhole in the piazza a couple times. Once it was all passengers and the other time it was passengers against officers. The time it was just passengers teams were even and John was on the winning team so he finally got his medal. Against the officers there were a whole lot more passengers than officers in the game so each officer got 3 or 4 turns for each one turn per passenger. The passengers won and we got medals for that too. John was also on the winning team at the second carpet bowling so he ended up with 3 medals.

yes or no game

One night we decided to go to the game shows at Princess Live instead of whatever was in the theater that night. There was a trivia going when we first got there, but then it went to something called Yes or No. People who volunteered to participate went up to the stage one at a time where 2 people would fire off questions for 3 minutes and if they said yes or no in any language they lost. The were not allowed to repeat the same non yes or no answer either. Most people managed the actual yes or no questions, but got tripped up by random comments designed to do just that. Like them mentioning someting along the lines of the town you were from only saying the wrong one so without thinking people would say no it’s … and lose. Only one person made the whole 3 minutes and that one had a bit of a reprive in the middle of the questions when they first thought he’d messed up, but really he hadn’t. The clock kept running while they sorted it out so he really didn’t have to answer questions for the full 3 minutes. They gave him the winning prize anyway since it was nearly the end of the cruise and nobody had won that game yet – for the entire cruise, not just that night. That prize was a bottle of champagne. The losers got things like a broken pencil, an empty packet that the free Effy necklaces come in, a small piece of string, or other useless items.

medals and coasters

They did have quite a lot of fun games on that cruise. Definitely a bigger variety of different games than the average cruise ship.

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