Presented by EA Creator Network – Software Not Final

The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories adds a total of seven new wedding and marriage-related social events. Engaged Sims can host engagement dinners, rehearsal dinners, bach parties, and family gatherings before their big day. Wedding ceremonies and receptions can be planned as separate social events instead of being lumped together. Vow renewals for married Sims are a social event now instead of just being an interaction on the wedding arch.

One of the final social events your Sims may find themselves hosting shortly before their big day is the Bach Party event. The Bach Party is a gender neutral version of traditional bachelor and bachelorette parties; however, they are much the same thing and your engaged couple can still have their own separate Bach Parties with their friends. Here’s everything you need to know about hosting a Bach Party.

Planning the Event

There are two ways Sims can plan a Bach Party; through the phone and the calendar. Planning a Bach Party through the phone will start the event immediately. Using the calendar to plan the event will allow you to schedule the party for a specific date and time in the future. On the phone, select Plan Wedding Event in the social tab and select the Bach Party. On the calendar, select the day you’d like to plan the event for. Scroll down in the left sidebar and select Add a Wedding Event then select the Bach Party.

Invite Sims

The Invite Sims tab has four roles to fill; hosts, guests, entertainer, and mixologist. The Entertainer and Mixologist roles are optional; you don’t need to have them, especially if you plan to host the party on a lot where entertainers and mixologists already show up by default. Your Bach Party needs to have at least 1 host and 2 guests, though. Unlike other wedding events, both partners can’t be hosts but you can add your Sim’s partner as a guest if you want to have a joint Bach Party for both of them. If you want friends and family of both engaged Sims to attend, make sure the Sim planning the event knows all of their betrothed’s friends and family, too. Otherwise, they won’t show up in the invite list.

Plan Activities

The next tab will let you select the activities you’d like to have at your Bach Party. All wedding events have customizable activities so you can tailor all of your wedding celebrations to your Sims’ preferences and cultures.

The available activities to choose from for Bach Parties are:

• Desserts
• Drinks
• Dancing
• Have Toasts
• Celebration Feast

The activities you select are purely up to your own tastes and preferences. Choose all of them, only one of them, or an assortment somewhere in-between.

Yes, we were also a bit disappointed that watching a “dancer” was not an option here. We know this feature could not be too risqué given the game’s T rating but it would have been fun to have something similar to The Sims 3 where the dancer does some silly, goofy moves in some type of costume. As an optional feature, of course.

Select a Place

You can select the location and time of your event on this screen. Bach Parties can be hosted on many different lot types. The following are all the lot types that showed up as being available for us in the venue list:

• Residential (Engaged Couple’s Residence)
• Bar
• Beach
• Café
• Nightclub
• Lounge
• Museum
• Park
• Pool
• Wedding Venue
• Chalet Gardens
• Karaoke Bar
• Island Bluff
• Ancient Ruins
• Centre Park

We did place a restaurant and spa down in our world just to see if they would be available venues for this event but they did not appear in the list of venues.

Hosting the Event

If you planned the event using the phone, the event will start immediately. If you planned the event through the calendar, you will receive a notification one hour before the event starts to remind you about it. If there’s any setting up that needs to be done beforehand, it’s a good idea to head to the venue an hour early to do any prep work, like filling buffet tables, drink fountains, and adding any objects needed for the activities you chose.

When the event starts, you will be prompted to travel to the venue you picked if your Sims are not already there and any Sims you invited will show up. During our Bach Party, other Sims still showed up on the lot and crashed the party. It wasn’t a huge problem for us; they did not interfere with the event goals and if anything, they added to the social atmosphere but if you’d prefer to make your Bach Party invitee-only, we recommend hosting on a residential lot. We hosted our Bach Party at a nightclub in Windenburg so having other Sims around helped to make the event feel more lively.

You’ll notice that the Bach Party is a bit different from the Engagement Dinner and Rehearsal Dinner which are both very similar to each other. The other events automatically include both engaged partners as hosts but the Bach Party does not. This allows you to choose whether you want separate Bach Parties for each partner or if you’d prefer to have both partners present for a joint Bach Party. Just invite your partner as a guest to have both partners present. The activities and available venues differ slightly from the other events as well.

You’ll see the typical social event goal tracker pop up in the top left corner but it works a little differently than other social events. There is no bronze, silver, and gold progress bar listed at the top and no main goal to complete; the success of the social event just depends on whether or not you are able to complete all of the activities you selected for the event.

Many of the objects tied to event activities, such as the champagne bottles on ice and dance floors have group interactions on them to help you control the flow of the event. You can direct all your guests to come and make toasts or dance together. This avoids the problem of your guests all milling about aimlessly doing their own thing. Just click the object and select “Call Attendees to Activity.” If guests are currently occupied with another event activity, they may not be responsive to being assigned a different activity. If you’ve just called everyone to make toasts, it’s best to wait until all the guests have finished their drinks before directing them to dance, for example.

If you don’t know how to complete a specific activity, hover over the activity in the event goals list to get a tooltip with some helpful information on how to complete it.

Our Bach Party did not have an event timer but it started at 5pm when we scheduled it via the calendar and ended at exactly 11pm so it seems like this event lasts for 6 in-game hours. We didn’t have a lot of activities scheduled for this event; mostly just drinking and dancing but we still found it a bit stressful completing all the goals on time. Our Sims were so busy chatting with each other that they ignored their drinks. We’d have to cancel the conversation to encourage them to finish their drinks. We did run into a few hiccoughs with some actions. For example, ordering drinks for the group didn’t seem to complete the Drinks activity but ordering drinks individually did. Sims also would not gather at the champagne bottles for toasts when using the Call Attendees to Activity option. They did gather to toast when using the Make a Toast interaction, however.

Hosting a Bach Party, like all the other lead-up events to the wedding ceremony, is optional. My Wedding Stories is about tailoring your wedding to your own likes and experiences so if a Bach Party is not something that suits your Sims, you can skip it entirely.