How to play with drunk people

If it’s too late for this advice and you’re tipsily googling “games to play drunk” while your friends stare expectantly and wait for instructions, then honestly, just play Pictionary. I know you don’t have cards: try a random word generator, or get everyone to open a book on any page and draw the first interesting noun they find.

Right, now that that’s out of the way: drinking.

I came to drinking slightly late; I was in my mid-20s before I had more than a polite sip of champagne. I like it! I like being a bit drunk when I’m around friends who are also a bit drunk. I like the sense of relaxation, and the increased communal willingness to try something silly, and the intensity. I like the way drinking accelerates the lifecycle of inside jokes. I like how being a bit drunk dulls my almost-constant freelancer sense that whenever I’m not working, I should probably be working.

Drinking also changes how people play. Look at Vapours, which comes up as a game for rowdy friends “all in a state of intoxication” in Ben Jonson’s 1614 play ‘Bartholomew Fair’:

Vapours

It’s such a tiny, slight set of rules, almost impossible to fail at, but that simplicity and aimlessness is part of what makes it work for the drunk. Games for drunk people shouldn’t just be games that are ideal for sober people that work for drunk people as well. Instead they should be games that benefit from a shorter attention span, from distractability, from easy amusement.

Luckily, games like this are easy to find. Try this one, adapted from a famous list of games that Gautama Buddha suggested were not suitable for monks, who have better things to do with their time. For drunk non-monks, it’s a good time.

Shape Up

Singing and space travel

The relationship between games and drinking is complicated by the fact that some of the functions that drinking fulfils – a social structure, a focus, a reason to get together, something to do with your hands – are functions that are also fulfilled by games.

Think about karaoke, and about the PlayStation megahit SingStar. Drinking isn’t mandatory for karaoke, but at least in the UK the default assumption tends to be that karaoke happens with a drink in hand and another already inside. The drinking decreases participants’ self-consciousness, and provides an alibi for bad singing or enthusiastic dancing.

Compare this to SingStar, which presents players with a song and gives points for how well they hit the notes. For good singers, this can be frustrating: it penalises them for putting their own stamp on a song. But for the rest of us? Speaking as an exceptionally bad singer who sometimes struggles to feel comfortable at karaoke, I never had a problem with SingStar. The points system is a distraction from self-consciousness. It’s an alibi. It’s an excuse.

Just like drinking.

So, given that games and drinking can fulfil similar social functions, what happens when you combine them? Well, they can support each other – or they can undermine each other.

Sam Sheffield’s game DunDunDunDun plays with this tension. It’s a videogame where players compete to move awkward spacecraft around a screen. The unwieldy steering is controlled by a traditional game controller: so far, so unremarkable. The speed of movement, however, is controlled by blowing into a breathalyser: the higher your blood alcohol content, the faster your spacecraft goes.

The ideal player is drunk enough to power their spacecraft, but not so drunk that they can’t steer it. This feels like a metaphor for the ideal good-times party-game player, someone who has perhaps had a drink or two and is really ready to commit to a game, but who isn’t yet incoherent. But given that Sheffield himself rarely drinks, perhaps the game is more ambivalent than it seems.

An awkward drinking game

Another drinking game, Lee Shang Lun’s Washing Machine, is much more explicit about its critique of alcohol’s role in social contexts. In this one-off performance at a night of games in a Melbourne bar, Lee – wearing only his underpants – set himself up at a table with a deck of cards and a bottle of rum. Players could challenge him to a simple card game and if they won, paint a part of his body white; if they lost, they had to feed him a shot of rum.

It’s an intense, deeply uncomfortable game that digs into Australian attitudes to race and drinking, and to the nation’s history as an invading penal colony whose first riots were about access to alcohol.

Lee himself, who had never drunk before, ended the night with only a quarter of his bottle of rum left, and he remembers little of the performance beyond scattered moments, some of them reconstructed from photos and stories. These include spraying water from his mouth over the crowd, wetting himself as he stumbled to the toilet to throw up, feeling desperately unhappy but unable to stop grinning, gradually losing his ability to explain the premise of the game to its participants.

From a callous, game-design perspective, one of the things that Washing Machine therefore demonstrates is that drunkenness is not a single state to step into, but a state in constant flux, a malfunction that our body earnestly tries to fix for us even as we pour another drink. Another is that whether we’re drinking ourselves or not, the presence of alcohol changes the atmosphere for play.

Even in contexts less fraught than Washing Machine, there’s no perfect game for drunk people, though there are characteristics that work better than others. Board-games writer Matt Thrower recently asked on Twitter about games that people liked to play “completely wasted”; answers tended towards simple, fast, creative games like Telestrations, a commercial version of a traditional drawing game, or dexterity games like Jenga. A lot of people went for Monikers, a commercial version of the Hat Game.

The Hat Game

Simplicity and repetition

The best games for drunk people are familiar to at least one of the players in the group, and preferably more. They’re funny. They’re simple. They don’t require anyone to make any sort of judgement call about physical, mental or emotional safety. Maybe they invite people to perform or sing or draw or do something else they might feel awkward about: the structure of the rules and the lower self-consciousness of someone who’s been drinking can pull in the same direction.

Finally, they should be games that repay repeat play. Perhaps the most true thing about drunk players is: once they find something that’s fun, they stick with it. You can’t stop them from having the wrong kind of fun, and make them have another, more sophisticated type of fun instead. You can’t get them to switch game because you think variety will make for a more memorable evening. You just have to set things up and let everyone get on with it.