The Only Drinking Games Worth Playing (According to Us)
- Felix
- May 5
- 4 min read
A completely unbiased list...We may have a game on it.
There are approximately four thousand drinking games on the internet. Most of them are either Beer Pong variations dressed up with a new name, or they require equipment nobody actually owns.
These ones are different. These are the ones you remember.
Drinking Jenga
The concept is simple: write rules on Jenga blocks, pull blocks, do what they say, don't knock the tower over. The execution is chaos.
The fun part isn't the tower. It's designing the blocks. Here are some of ours:
Busta Rhyme — say a sentence. The next person has to rhyme with it. Keep going until someone chokes. They drink.
Busta Move — same but with dance moves. You do a move, the next person copies it and adds one. Mess up, drink. This one ends friendships.
Hats — everyone must keep a hat or hat-like object on their head for the rest of the game. If it falls, you drink. Someone always ends up with a crisp packet on their head by round three.
Hide and Seek — close your eyes for 30 seconds, everyone hides. First two you find must drink. Last one found picks someone to drank. In a flat. With eight people. Absolute scenes.
Touch and Go — if you touch this block, you must take it out. No takebacks.
Put Me Back — draw this block, put it back, pick a different one. A get out of jail free card that still somehow feels like punishment.
No Hands Round — for one round, nobody can touch blocks with their hands. Use pens, chopsticks, whatever you can find. The tower will fall. It's not a question of if.
9/11 — go to the corner of the room and throw this block at the tower. Hit it and everyone chugs. Miss and you drink alone in the corner where you belong. Yes it's called that. No we're not explaining further.
Flunky ball
Learned this one at a festival in Berlin and it didn't leave us alone for the rest of the summer.
Two teams face each other about ten meters apart. Everyone has a beer in front of them on the ground. In the middle of the field: one bottle. One ball.
Teams take turns throwing the ball at the bottle. If you knock it over, your whole team starts chugging. The other team has to sprint for the ball, set the bottle back up, and get everyone behind their line before shouting STOP. When they do, you stop drinking.
First team to finish all their beers wins.
It sounds simple. It is not simple. It requires accuracy, sprint speed, and the ability to chug while laughing hysterically at the other team fumbling over a ball in a park at 4pm. It's particularly popular at German festivals and university campuses, and there are actual annual championships. Wikipedia We believe this.
Needs outdoor space, a ball, and a bottle. Absolutely worth it.
Kings Cup
You know Kings Cup. Everyone knows Kings Cup. If you don't, here's the short version: cards drawn from around a central cup, each card has a rule, Ace is waterfall, 4 is floor, King means pour into the central cup and whoever draws the fourth King drinks it.
The reason it's on this list is that it's genuinely good. It's stood the test of time because the structure is just right — simple enough to explain in two minutes, flexible enough to play with house rules, social enough that even quiet people get drawn in.
It also scales perfectly from four people to fourteen. Not many games do that.
Horse Race
Get a deck of cards. Remove the four Aces and lay them in a row — these are your horses. The rest of the deck goes in a separate pile. Players pick a suit and bet drinks on their horse before the race starts. The dealer flips cards from the deck one at a time. Whichever suit comes up, that Ace moves forward one space. First Ace to the finish line wins. Losing bettors drink what they wagered.
Add a fence. Eight cards face down in a row beside the track. Each time an Ace reaches a fence card, flip it over — whatever suit it is moves back one space. It turns a simple race into a drama.
Best played with at least one person who gets genuinely emotionally invested in their horse. There's always one.
Drink Drank Drunk the game
200 cards.
Five categories.
One deck that plays differently every single time.
Action cards do their thing and get discarded. Rule cards sit in the middle of the table and apply to everyone — maximum two in play at once, so they stack and collide with each other. Power cards sit in front of whoever drew them and give them something to use. Weakness cards do the same but make your life worse. Special cards you keep secret and play whenever you want.
The Classic mode adds wild cards to the deck — Drinky, Dranky, Drunky and the Black Card. Every time someone draws one, they add something to the central cup. Whoever draws the last wild card loses and drinks the whole thing.
What makes it different from every other card game is the way the table builds up. You're not just playing cards, you're building a situation. Halfway through a round someone's holding three weakness cards — can't use their dominant hand, has to make monkey sounds before every drink, and must thank and compliment whoever makes them drink. Meanwhile there's a rule in play that means everyone's wearing improvised hats and another that means no swearing. And someone just played a Special card that lets them charge people to use the toilet.
It ends when the deck runs out or everyone gets too drink drank drunk. Usually the latter.
Made in Amsterdam. Available at drinkdrankdrunkthegame.com.
Play responsibly. Use water if you want. We won't judge you. (We'll judge you a little.)
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