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Despite the fact that beer practically drinks itself, for some, a little extra motivation is needed. Packs of cards are shuffled, ping-pong balls are bounced and dice are rolled to encourage people to drink. With the rampant popularity of drinking games at parties, one might expect just about any game to be better with a beer in hand. I assure you this is not so.
Take board games, for instance. We are all aggravated by stingy “Monopoly” players, but imagine how tensions would soar after a few beers. And just what would the rules be? Some games simply don’t have discreet events to drink on, or if they do, they scale poorly — a “Risk” game where you drink every time you capture an enemy territory would hardly be a game at all, especially toward the end, where dozens of countries are swapped back and forth between two marginally different superpowers.
How about television? Some shows not only suggest drinking but also encourage it. Travel drinking show “Three Sheets” has its own set of rules, and as a gag, “Futurama’s” introduction in one episode includes “Drink every time you see the robot.” Hint: Don’t try it unless you no longer want to see anything anymore, let alone robots. In a move of inspired stupidity, an old roommate and I once decided on drinking rules for “Iron Chef” — every time the secret ingredient is mentioned, there is an interruption on the floor by the secondary announcer, someone says “Kitchen Stadium” or a gong is hit, you take a drink. These could easily provide enough drinks in an hour span individually; all four simultaneously was just overwhelming.
These games fail because the number of drinks you take over time is too high. With just about any rule addition to “Risk,” drinking would occur at an interval no greater than a single turn, and over a three-hour-long game, it gets incredibly unwieldy. With television-based games, at most you have an hour or less to finish, and most rules would encourage drinking for common events lest you hardly finish a single beer over that period. An ideal game encourages moderate drinking over a long period of time — anything more and even drinkers with exceptional tolerance are reaching for wastebaskets.
For better or worse, the games that strike a good balance are already well-established. A serious game of beer die takes about an hour and usually consists of less than three beers, unless the players are pregaming in high gear. A good card game — whose name is a synonym for rectum — can encompass an entire night with an appropriate amount of drinking. For creative types, options are limited in practicality to the well-trodden, with little room for flexibility. Therein lies the rub — fun games are light on the drinking and games that encourage a lot of drinking are short on fun. My advice? Skip the premise and enjoy your beer.
