Ode to Drinking Games

Last weekend, I played flip-cup for the first time. For those unfamiliar, Flip-cup is a drinking game, a team relay race where two teams race to have everyone drink a shot of beer, flip their cup exactly 180 degrees, and move down the line. It is a rare drinking game where in general women are better than men (due, I suspect to the high skill quotient and low drinking quotient). While it will not get you wasted (or get me wasted, at least) it is a lot of fun.

In honor of learning said socially acceptable drinking game, I thought I would muse on the various drinking games I have played. Here they are, in order of awesome

4: Kings: I like playing cards. I like drinking tons of beer. Yet I have never gotten that much of a kick out of card drinking games. I would much rather have a couple of beers and play a card game than marry the two. It breeds annoying rule quoting and is generally too tense for my taste. Card drinking games are best served at all-guy weekends in the woods, where just drinking or just playing cards has become too boring, and a new form of entertainment is needed.

My favorite cards and beer story (besides many wonderful poker nights, but that is a different beast) is when Teach brought a deck of cards to the Continental, and we played Spades at the booth as we drank cheap beer. Again drinking + cards = good, drinking * cards = too much work.

3: Beirut: Also know as Beer Pong (but purists will tell you Beer Pong is technically a different game, a variation of Ping Pong including beer), Beirut is the frat boy standard. Two teams of 2, one long table, some Dixie cups and ping pong balls and off you go. While it gets a bad rap for its high douchbage following, Beirut can actually be a blast. It has a great balance of social interaction, physical activity, and inebriation. The average person can play the game, and drink the amount of beer required without getting blasted (for a game or two at least). Oddly enough, I never played this game in college. The only places I have played Beirut are in dive bars in New York, and with my siblings at my parent’s home in Westchester (my little sister needs to work on her game). Sadly, one such dive bar, Time Out, closed down (probably due to numerous health code violations), so if I ever get the urge, I will need to go hunting for a new dive.

2: Quarters: I have played two types of Quarters. In High School, I played Speed Quarters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarters) which did a number on 16 year old Quantum, especially since I usually played with Lacrosse players, who beat me both in coordination and size. In college, I played a more relaxed variation, using only one glass and requiring everyone to take a single shot at the glass, and the person who sank it made the person next to him drink the glass (that person had one chance to make the shot, if he did, more beer was poured into the glass. Once we had a pot of 2 full glasses). I like both games very much (Speed is a little too intense though), but I find my stomach can no longer take the quick chugging required to play this game often. Hubris, Irish McJew, and I tried to play this game stoned once, and it was the saddest sight ever seen by men (McJew, it should be noted, is notably bad at this game).

1: Land Mines: This is the D-day of drinking games. Here are the official rules
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mine_%28drinking_game%29. Make no mistake, this is the big one. My roommate Gangsta taught it to me at the end of junior year, basically shaving five years off my life. Playing it guaranteed someone was doing a porcelain prayer before the game was over (I would occasionally pull a booting rally, ah college). Playing this game required about 2 cases of beer and five or six of the craziest sonabitches you could find. The danger of the game is that its high consumption rate and nature of play (using the empties at Land Mines is the secret of the game) would often leave the game ending with threats of fistfights. On one of the earlier games played, Hubris was sitting on my right, and Gangsta was sitting on his right. Hubris was getting pretty drunk (one nice thing about Land Mines, it encourages casual drinking while playing a drinking game, hence getting really messed up) and was earning his namesake. He eventually got up the gall to land mine Gangsta. Now Gangsta was already better at the game than all of us, but since he was sitting on Hubris’s right, controlled how much beer Hubris had to drink on his turn. This act of pride resulted in Hubris being punished mercilessly the rest of the game, leaving him utterly wasted and enraged. We later than coined the phrase “Never go to war with the man on your right” in honor of that massacre.

Alas, I am reaching the age where drinking games are both immature and somewhat life-threatening, but I will always look back at the good old days, where flinging a ball or coin could cause another man to vomit. Salad days indeed.