Drinking game

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Drinking games are games which involve drinking beer or other alcoholic beverages. These games take place usually among friends, at house parties, at public bars, or pubs. The objective of these games is either simply to drink competitively for speed, or to win via others becoming too drunk. Participants are primarily college students, young adults, or high school students.

Part of the series on
Popular
drinking games

Pong games
Beer pong | w/ Paddles
Slam | Dartmouth

Table games
Flip cup | Boat race
Arrogance | Quarters
Land Mine

Word games
I Never | 21
Drink while you think

Card games
Kings | President/Asshole
Hi-Lo | Horserace

Binge drinking games
Keg stand | Power Hour
Funneling | Shotgunning
Strawpedo | Yard of ale
Edward Forty-Hands

Contents

[edit] History of drinking games

Symposium sceneFresco depicting an early drinking party from the Tomb of the Diver, 475 B.C. Paestum Museum, Italy.
Symposium scene
Fresco depicting an early drinking party from the Tomb of the Diver, 475 B.C. Paestum Museum, Italy.

According to Dr. Rupert Thompson of the University of Cambridge the earliest reference to drinking games in Western literature is from Plato's Symposium (‘The Drinking Party’). The game was simple: fill a bowl with wine, drink it, and pass it on to the next person.

Kottabos is one of the earliest known drinking games. It involves skill in hitting a target across the room with the dregs and liquid at the bottom of one's drinking cup. Often there was some special prize for completing this goal and sometimes penalties for failure.Kottabos A modern variant is "Cottabus", also known as Arrogance, which requires that players take turns to add as much beer or wine as they like to a central jug before correctly predicting the result of the flip of a coin. Failure to call the coin toss correctly (or dropping it, which becomes a real possibility during the later stages of the game) means the "unlucky" player must drink the entire contents of the central jug.

[edit] Basic drinking games

The simplest drinking games are endurance games in which players compete to out-drink each other. Players take turns taking shots, and the last person standing is the winner. Some games have rules involving the "cascade" or "waterfall", which encourages each player to drink constantly from their cup so long as the player before him does not stop drinking. Such games can also favor speed over quantity, in which case players race to drink a beer the fastest.

[edit] Games to decide who buys the next round

In the U.S. military, a challenge coin is frequently used to determine who buys the next round. Usually the person with the coin of the lowest rank (meaning the officer or NCO who awarded the coin) has to buy the next round. However, a coin challenge can also be decided on speed, meaning the last person to show a coin when a group is challenged has to buy the next round.

[edit] Drinking games involving speed and not quantity

Many pub or bar games involve competitive drinking for speed and not necessarily quantity consumed. The object of these games may not be inebriation, but may involve simply "bragging rights" or wagers of cash which benefit the fastest drinker.

[edit] World records for speed beer drinking

Steven Petrosino, during his successful June 1977 Guinness World record attempt at the Gingerbreadman Pub in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He established records for ¼ liter (0.137 seconds), and for ½ liter (0.4 seconds), but Guinness accepted only the record for 1 liter.
Steven Petrosino, during his successful June 1977 Guinness World record attempt at the Gingerbreadman Pub in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He established records for ¼ liter (0.137 seconds), and for ½ liter (0.4 seconds), but Guinness accepted only the record for 1 liter.

The Guinness Book of Records began to list world records for speed drinking in this category in the early 1960s. These early drinking records involved drinking beer from challenging vessels such as the yard of ale glass, which, if not correctly mastered, resulted in the user receiving a blast of beer in his or her face. The 1969 edition of the Guinness Book lists Lawrence Hill (age 22) of Bolton as having consumed a 2.5 pint yard of ale in 6.5 seconds on December 17, 1964. The 1974 edition lists Jack Boyle, age 52, of Barrow-in-Furness as having consumed a 3 pint yard of ale in 10.15 seconds on May 14, 1971. In the mid 1970s, Guinness began to list speed records achieved using any drinking vessel. The 1977 edition dropped the earlier records established by Hill and Boyle, and listed a 2.5 pint yard record by the RAF at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire in 5.0 seconds and a three pint yard record established at Corby Town F.C. on January 23, 1976 in 5.5 seconds". The 1977 edition listed the new world record established at the Gingerbreadman Pub by Steven Petrosino (age 25) of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania on June 22, 1977. Petrosino drank 1 liter of beer in 1.3 seconds. Video: ¼ liter in 0.18 seconds Petrosino approached the challenge scientifically, and used two specially designed half-liter drinking vessels to establish this world beer record. [1] The 1977 edition also lists Peter G. Dowdeswell of Earls Barton for drinking two pints (one liter) of beer from a single vessel in 2.3 seconds on June 11, 1975 and two liters in 6.0 seconds on 7 February 1975. These records were all dropped from the Guinness book in 1991 due to concerns about litigation.[1], [2]

[edit] Games of speed consumption

[edit] Drinking games involving memory, the power of observation, or intellectual skill

Games that involve creative thinking (i.e. naming a sports player whose name begins with a particular letter) might be played under a "drink while you think" rule in which a player must consume his beverage until he can come up with an answer.

Numerous drinking games are based on popular movies, television shows, or books. The rules for these games usually require that the players drink when some event occurs, such as a character speaking a catch phrase in comedies, or the use of a particular technology in science fiction. Typically the size of the drink is inversely proportional to the frequency of the event — an event that happens rarely can call for downing one's current drink. These games might have simple, easily remembered rules, or they might have detailed rules, often available on the Internet.

Games involving the powers of observation may commonly be played while watching sports. A player may be assigned the name or number of a sports player, and must drink when that name or number is mentioned by the commentators or shown on the screen. Current events such as the State of the Union address, the Oscars, Eurovision Song Contest and the Rod Allen Drinking Game have become targets of such drinking games, often as a means of injecting humor into long or monotonous events. Variants of this theme may penalize participants who fail to observe an expected event. On the television show Frasier, the episode A Tsar is Born has Frasier, Niles and Martin play a version of this game while watching the Antiques Roadshow by drinking every time the word "veneer" is mentioned.

In drinking games involving memory, each player must repeat a series of events, and then add to it. If a player repeats the series incorrectly, he or she must take a drink. Another variation on this memory theme is a game that is played while drinking with the non-dominant hand (left hand for the right-handed, and vice versa). If a player accidentally picks up their glass with the wrong hand, they have to finish their drink. Such games are not difficult at the onset, but become much more challenging as the game continues as players become inebriated and their coordination and memory deteriorate.

[edit] Drinking games of skill, memory or repetition

[edit] Drinking games involving coordination

Some drinking games, such as Quarters or beer pong, involve performing certain skills, which become more difficult as the level of intoxication increases.

A very popular drinking game in Germany is Flunkyball: comprising of two teams, one ball and a certain amount of empty beer cans/bottles plus one beer for every player. The teams form up on one line each aproximately 10 meters apart, in the middle the empty bottles/cans are lined. One team throws the ball at the bottles/cans in the middle. If a bottle/can is hit and falls the other team now has to run to the bottle, pick it up and put it on its original place, pick up the ball, get back to their line and yell "stop". As long as that didn't happen the other team is allowed to drink the beer. Then it is the other teams turn, also if no bottle was hit. Spilling the beer, continue to drink after a "stop" and other rule violations are punished with a new, full beer. If a player finishes his beer, they yell "Tot (dead)", lift the bottle up and turn it upside down for everyone to see that there is nothing left but foam. The team which finishes all beers first wins the round. There were championships in 2005 and 2006.

[edit] Drinking rules

Many drinking games have their own set of governing rules. While a drinking game is in progress, or between games, International Drinking Rules may be in force.

[edit] Other drinking games

[edit] Card games

  • Circle of death
  • Hi-Lo
  • Horserace
  • Kings
  • President (also known as Asshole, Presidents & Assholes, or P & A)
  • Ride the Bus (also known as Drunk Driver)
  • Ring of Fire
  • Up and Down the River
  • UNO (drink when a card is drawn)
  • Whirlwind (gets the room spinning in under an hour)
  • Pyramid
  • Higher or Lower (like Bruce Forsythe's Game.) Shuffle the cards and then put the first one face down. E.g. 3 Clubs, the person to your left has to guess if the next card will be higher or lower, if they guess wrong then they have to drink "fingers" of beer proportional to the number of cards underneath. If the next card, for example, was a 3 of diamonds, then all the players have to put their fingers on their noses, the last one to do so has to drink a shot of vodka (or any other spirit of that sort.) The game can last as long as you want it to, just keep reshuffling the cards when you get to the end. The more you play the more drunk you will become and your reactions will slow down so you'll be slower at putting your finger on your nose, so then you get even more drunk, etc.
  • Hockey - All you need is 4 people, a deck of cards, and plenty of beer. First, the players divide into teams of 2. Partners sit across the table from each other. The cards are all dealt out. The point of the game is to score the most points. You score a point every time you lay the card of the same value as the person before you laid. To make things more interesting, there are "safe cards": Eights and Jacks. You cannot lay a safe card on another safe card (i.e. no 8 on 8, J on J, 8 on J, J on 8). The team that was scored upon drinks until told to stop by a member of the scoring team (this explains the variation in the buzz factor). After each point, the cards are cleared by the scoring team (be sure to keep track of each point for scoring purposes). After all the cards have been laid, that's the end of a period. As in the actual game of hockey, there are 3 periods. The person to the left of period 1's dealer becomes the new dealer, and the same rules apply. Keep score like this:
    • End of period 1: Team 1 scored 5 points - Team 2 scored 12 points - Team 2 leads 7-0 after 1 period
    • End of period 2: Team 1 scored 7 points - Team 2 scored 8 points - Team 2 now leads 8-0 after 2 periods (7+(8-7))
    • End of period 3: Team 1 scored 15 points - Team 2 scored 3 points - Team 1 wins, 4-0 (15-3=12; 12-8=4)

[edit] Dice games

[edit] Quarters games

[edit] Other party and pub games

[edit] Conversion of other games

Almost any game of skill or chance that does not traditionally involve drinking can theoretically be converted into a drinking game. In some games, conversion could be as easy as letting the winner distribute shots to the other players, while in more complicated games, shots can be forced upon players for specific events in the game.

For example, in the game of chess, players may have to take drinks when one of their pieces are captured (or perhaps the opposite, where they have to drink upon capturing a piece), as portrayed in the checkers-game scene of Our Man in Havana (in which the pieces are replaced with mini-whisky bottles). In a popular variant of baseball called Beer Ball, players have to drink some beer every time they reach a base.

The Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club have experimented with ways of converting many existing games into drinking games, and have frequently invented their own as a consequence. It has often been found that some quite complex algorithms are required to produce a good fining system. Those trying to convert an existing game into a drinking game should therefore not give up easily.

Players should exercise caution before choosing to add drinking to any sport that could be dangerous under intoxication, especially in such games as Stake.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.calwineries.com/blog/2007/03/12/dear-guinness-book-of-world-records-where-s-the-alcohol-entries
  2. ^ http://www.beerrecord.com

[edit] External links

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