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Drinking games are games which involve drinking alcoholic beverages. The point is either simply to drink, or to make your opponent drink more than you do, so that they become drunk and drink even more, and so forth. Cottabus is an ancient game involving skill in pouring a swig of wine into a large vessel. A modern variant of Cottabus, known as Arrogance, has players take turns to add as much beverage as they like to a central jug before correctly calling a flip of a coin. Failure to call the coin correctly (or dropping it, a real possibility during the later stages of the game), means the unlucky (or clumsily drunk) player must drink the entire contents of the central jug.
It is not immediately obvious whether the person with the highest intoxication level at the end of the game is actually the winner or the loser. It largely depends on whether each player has to provide their own beverages or if they share beverages from a common pool.
Common drinking games
Perhaps the simplest drinking games are the ones 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", which encourages players to drink constantly from their cup so long as one chosen player doesn't stop drinking. Such games can also favor speed over quantity, in which case players might, for example, race to "chug" a beer the fastest.
Numerous drinking games are based on popular movies, television shows, and even books. The rules for these usually instruct the players to drink when some event occurs, such as a character speaking a catch phrase in comedies, or the use or mention 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 finishing one's current can/bottle. These games might have simple, easily remembered rules, or they might have detailed rules, often available on the Internet.
A generalization of the above can apply to other circumstances in which the participants are observing a situation in which certain predictable events occur, such as a movie, a football game, or other people at a party or in a bar. For example, each player may be assigned the name or number of a football player, and must drink when that name or number is mentioned by the commentators or shown on the screen. Events such as the State of the Union address, the Oscars, and the Eurovision Song Contest (for example) have become targets of such drinking games, often as a means of relieving the monotony of a long event.
Some drinking games, such as Quarters, involve performing certain skills, which become more difficult as the level of intoxication increases. Other drinking games rely on 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. These games start out simple, but become much more challenging as the series grows and the players get drunker and their coordination and memory deteriorate.
Other drinking games
Card games - President (aka Asshole, Presidents & Assholes)
- Drink your face off
- Hi-Lo
- Kings
- Pub Crawls
- Sheps Deal
Dice games
Skill, memory and repetition
Movies, television, music, etc.
Speed consumption
Other party and pub games
External links - The Screen Savers drinking game (http://www.rapidfish.org/joan/mwwdlsc/drinkinggame.html)
- The Gulf War drinking game (http://www.gulfwardrinkinggame.com/)
- The Cops drinking game (http://www.avalon.net/~matrix/drink/cops.html)
- Beer Trek (http://planetofthegeeks.com/trek/beertrek/)
- The Ultimate Drinking Game page (http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Set/7200/drinking.htm)
- Bar Meister: Online to Drinking (http://www.barmeister.com/games.html)
- The Drinking Games collection site (http://www.drinkinggames.info)
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