(I've had a house rule where people must drink something though, so if they don't want alchs I get them water) On that note, I also try to avoid mechanics that encourage people to play until the end - IMO, a good game of Kings is one left unfinished because people got buzzed enough to feel comfortable making their own conversation.Įveryone is allowed to have their own definition of what 'one drink' means nobody should be goaded into drinking more than they're comfortable with. So when designing a set of Kings rules, I think the worst decisions you could make are rules that prevent or discourage people from talking to each other. Unlike a lot of other games, the point of drinking games is pretty much entirely to socialize. Drinking games are a means for people to get comfortable talking and interacting with each other. This explains why playing drinking games too competitively is a social mistake in many circumstances - such individuals are forgetting that most drinking games are more of a ritualized set of fun actions rather than a competitive sport. Since the purpose of drinking games is to drink, this creates a tension where performing well at the smaller goals means performing poorly at the larger goal.

In these games, the penalty of losing a round is to simply take a drink and continue. The 'goal' of most drinking games tends to be not-losing, rather than explicitly winning. For the sake of simplicity I'm going to look at Kings Cup specifically, which I consider the epitome of what a drinking game means.

I think they're kind of their own category, and that's why purchasable games that specifically revolve around drinks tend to fall flat.įor starters, here's a few observations about drinking games. Drinking games are funny because I wouldn't really call most of them 'games' as much as 'rituals'.

King cups drinking game