About Grand Games
Original live game shows, built by people who program community recreation for a living — and who got tired of watching good rooms sit through the same night twice.
Steve Farrens has spent his career in public recreation — a Recreation Coordinator in Grand Island, and today the Recreation Superintendent in Hastings. Building programming that actually gets people to show up, in real Nebraska communities, is the day job. Grand Games is what happens when you point that same skill at a night built purely to be fun.
It started with senior programming. Bingo and Pitch are wonderful, and they were also most of what was on the calendar, week after week. So we tried live game shows instead — in the spirit of the classics everybody grew up watching, but with a Parks & Rec twist: real physical challenges alongside the mental ones, and a format where everyone in the room plays instead of watching three people play. Seniors loved it. So we ran it for the 21+ crowd. They loved it just as much.
“You can only play the same game so many times.”
That's the whole reason Grand Games exists. Once you've seen what a genuinely new night does to a room, running someone else's format stops being enough — so we started writing and building our own shows. Every game on our lineup is original, built by us, and run by us — for bar nights, holiday parties, fundraisers, company events, and any group that wants a night they haven't had before.
“Us” is Steve and Mandi Farrens, married since 2017 and hosts by temperament long before it was a business — our wedding was a full costume party three days before Halloween, because a normal reception seemed like a waste of a good room. At a show, Steve is on the mic running the floor and Mandi is on the controls running the game. Two people, a truck full of gear, set up fast and packed out clean.
We're both creative people, and we'd rather keep inventing than repeat ourselves. The lineup will keep growing for as long as we can think of new ways to entertain Central Nebraska.