It’s not that I don’t like frat parties. What could be cozier than spending a few hours getting wastey-face with 300 close, personal strangers who probably know a lot more about physics than they’re willing to reveal? Nothing, except possibly spending two hours scrubbing off a marinade of melted makeup, boxed wine spills and other people’s sweat as soon as you get home. And yet for some reason I was not in the mood for Kappa Sig Maybe-You’ll-Get-Some this weekend. What happened to a simpler time, a better time, when the Spice Girls were hot, “Full House” ruled the screen and the closest we ever got to controlled substances was juice boxes or possibly spinning around until we felt sick?

This weekend, I had a sleepover.

If you’re in a relationship, you’re probably complaining that every night is a sleepover — but when’s the last time your boyfriend let you give him a make-over or a new hairdo made out of shaving cream? I called up the girls (they were skeptical), ran to Safeway for cocoa mix and cranked up the hawt 90s jamz. Zigazig-ah.

After the obligatory initial sleepover girly factor — gossiping about cute boys, an absurdly long conversation about eyeliner and maraschino cherries on everything — we got to the crux of the event: games. Since we were going old school, I racked my three years of Girl Scout Assistant Troop Leader experience to find a few games that would bring back that old spin-’til-you-drop sensation.

1-2-3: To get everybody into the game-playing mood, the first thing we attempted was the deceptively simple “1-2-3” game. The premise, if you’ve never been on a catastrophically long road trip, is that one player thinks of any word and when he has, says, “One.” Then another player thinks of a word and says, “Two.” On “three” both players say their random words. The goal is to think of a word that aptly combines some quality of both random words, and to match this word with the other person playing. Like “memorable” and “Germany” might yield “Hitler” as a middle ground, or “golf” and “blue” might lead to “balls.” Once you think of your guess, say “one” or “two” and on “three” reveal it simultaneously with your partner. If you don’t match up on the first try, then keep playing, trying to come up with a new word that relates to both of the guesses in the last round.

Flour Swing: While word games are fun, they just don’t scream “eight-year-old at summer camp” enough to satisfy my sleepover cravings. So next, we went outside, armed with knee-high stockings and a bag of flour to play one of my all-time favorite games. To play Flour Swing, you pour about four cups of flour each in the toes of two knee-high stockings, tie a knot under the flour, and put the free end of the stocking on two people’s heads. Then they square off. The goal is to use your flour sack to dislodge your opponent’s. Be sure to wear old clothes — I got brutally flour-pummeled for suggesting the game in the first place and am not looking forward to laundry day. Also, try to brush off some of the white flour before you head back inside, or else some disgruntled janitor is going to wonder what Lindsay Lohan was doing in the stairwell next Monday.

Jell-o Toes: Our final game of the evening, I’ll admit, was discovered on a Christian youth ministry Web site while procrastinating on a film essay. To play, prepare two boxes of Jell-o (I chose lime green, redolent of Nickelodeon slime and the glory of life pre-puberty) in a disposable aluminum turkey roaster. As the Jell-o begins to set, drop in a bag of 100 marbles. Clear out a shelf in your fridge (dude, just throw out that six-gallon container of non-fat organic cottage cheese — you’re never going to finish it) and let it set for several hours. To play, spread out a tarp on the floor (disposable plastic tablecloths from Safeway are cheap and get the job done), put the roaster on it and have everyone sit around barefoot. The object of the game is to transfer as many marbles as you can from the roaster to a Dixie cup, using only your toes. Squelch.

After we’d cleaned everything up, my once-skeptical friends had completely transformed and were pretty psyched about the campy nostalgia. We hung out in a fort made of pillows and extra sheets, ate s’mores (helpful hint: Don’t use a lighter instead of a stovetop. It makes them taste like cancer.) and talked for hours. All in all, it was one alcohol-free weekend significantly more exciting than sitting in the Meyer 24-hour room, knocking back Jack and Cokes—hold the Jack. Plus, nobody spilled his beer on us.