From the moment the bouncer asks you your middle name and birth sign at the door, the drinking games are on.\nThe earliest known drinking game in literature is from Plato's Symposium in which players fill a bowl with wine, drink it, and pass it on. Games have gotten more advanced, and the rules differ from town to town, even within Bloomington, but the idea is the same: Why not play a game to show off your ping pong ball throwing, cup flipping, and beer pouring skills with a little peer pressure? \nIt's a game most people don't mind losing. You're playing to get drunk, but IU takes their drinking games serious, keeping track of beer pong wins, claiming house rules and taunting to no end.\n
Watch. Listen. Drink.
\nA great pre-game activity is the popular power hour. The basic idea is to drink a shot of beer every minute for an hour to a mix of music designed to skip songs every minute. It gets a lot of beer in you quickly and you get good background music. Name that tune works as well, with players making a mix and having others try to guess the artist or song title first and giving out drinking times at will.\nA popular song to drink to is the Police's "Roxanne," where half the players are assigned the line "Roxanne" or "Turn on your red light" and have to drink when it's played.\n"It's awesome," senior Kelly Spear said. "At the end of the song they just go back and forth between those two lines so it's like, whoa, that side, this side, that side, all drinking at once."\nHundreds of drinking games that go with TV shows or movies are on the internet and run the gamut from serious to silly to cult. A simple google search of drinking games finds games to play while watching shows like CNN, America's Next Top Model, and "Saved by the Bell." Rules will have players drinking whenever they hear: 'terror alert,' models talk about how they thought modeling would be easier, or Principle Belding saying 'Hey hey hey, what is going on here?' \nSenior Doug Maurer said one of his favorite games involves cult favorite "Boondock Saints," which has constant swearing and action.\n"You have to drink every time someone dies or says fuck," Maurer said. "You'll get shit faced."\n
It's in the cards:
\nIn kings, players go around the table, with the dealer having one player guess what number card is on top. If you guess nine on the first try, the dealer drinks for 10 seconds. If the guesser misses, the dealer tells the player to guess higher. On this guess, if correct the dealer drinks for five seconds. If they guess wrong, the guesser drinks for however many steps away from the card they were.\nThe dealer stays dealer until three people in a row don't get the right number on their first two guesses. After a card is used it is placed on the table, so towards the end of the game players know exactly which cards are left and the dealer will often have turns of drink five, drink ten, ten, ten…floor. \nSenior Jason Boyd enjoys the simple game, and doesn't even mind being dealer.\n"I like getting screwed, but not too hard," he said.\nKings is another popular game where every card has a specific action or mini-game where cards are spread on the table with a designated action for each card picked. 2-8 red cards you drink, black you give away. Nine's are rhyme time, ten's a category, and jack is thumb master. The queen allows its holder to become question master, forcing anyone who answers to drink. King gets to make a new rule and Ace is a waterfall where players all drink around the table until the person to your right finishes drinking. \n"Kings is always different," Boyd said. "When you play, everyone brings different rules to the table. Whenever I pick a king I do a beer bong and my rule is that someone has to do one with me. What can I say? I love beer bongs."\nWhile there are tons of variations of card games, some people find they like more action.\n"Kings sucks. It's for pussies," senior Kelly Spear said. "Card drinking games get old really fast. People don't want to be sitting down when they're drunk. The reason beer pong is good is that it's steady. You can play it all night long."\n
Games where you throw stuff:
\nBeer pong, or Beirut, is the king of home drinking games. Ten cups filled about a third up with beer, are shot at by two players a side, trying to make all the cups on the other teams side first. If both team members make a shot they get to shoot again, and bouncing it in gets another cup taken away. The only defense is taunting and anyone can swat away a bounced ball and girls can blow any ball out before it settles. \nStudents take down doors to create make-shift tables or make their own with from wood and signature paint jobs.\n"We had just unhinged my friend's bedroom door and were carrying it into the living room during little five when his landlord walked in," Boyd said. \nThe game originated from playing on ping pong tables, but around Bloomington most tables are wood. Painting the tables is popular, with many tables painted to look like basketball and football courts. IU seniors said they've seen Assembly Hall's court a bunch of times, the old Celtics court The Boston Garden, and they have plans for repainting their table.\n"We're going to paint the IU court on our beer die table and Chicago Bears stadium Soldier Field on our Beer Pong table," said senior Andy Shore.\nHis roommate, senior Jeff Miller, boasted he could toss balls around with the best of them with his straight elbow bend release.\n"I like beer pong 'cause I'm good at it," Miller said. "I can't bounce a quarter worth a damn."\nA couple times a week Shore said he'd drag the table from its resting place in the hallway to the kitchen and have friends over for a few games. Regular pong attendee Kelly Spear described her favorite moment of glory this summer.\n"I never make the last cup and I made it," she said. "Then they made the last cup so we went to overtime, you know? I'm pissed. And then we came back and I sank the last cup again. I mean, it was golden."\nBouncing quarters into a container is about the only consistent rule you'll find in the game. There's beer chandelier where contestants bounce a quarter into a circular formation of cups with one cup on top filled with beer. If the quarter goes in the top cup, all players chug their cup and the last one done has to finish the full top cup. Players can bounce into ice-cube trays, shot glasses, glasses of any kind, or in speed quarters, glasses and quarters are passed around willy-nilly in an all out quarters assault.\nBeer die isn't nearly as popular as its older brother, beer pong. Similarly to pong, two players from each team are at either end of the longer, narrower table. The difference is that players sit, and are attempting to get a thrown dice to bounce on the table and then hit the ground, land in a glass, or back on the table (with appropriate loft) for one point. \nFrom here on out, rules differ from place to place, but the object is to acquire points and you can never say the word five. Only Biz.\n
Bar drinking games
\nOnce you're done with a home game of kings, pong, or drinking along with your favorite TV show or movie, the bar scene has a couple games in store for you. That is, if you can remember your home address (or the person's id your using.) \nHands down, the favorite in Bloomington is "sink the Biz" at Nicks. There's pool and darts, but it's all about the biz. \nPlayers sit around a bucket of beer with a glass floating in it and take turns pouring in the glass until someone sinks the glass and has to chug it. The simple sounding game has a skill level to it.\n"Oh, there's some skill involved," Miller said. "You've gotta be able to tip really quickly and put barely and fluid in the cup, but get it as close to full for the next person as possible." \nAs most creative drinking games progress, rules get more complicated and your slurred speech gets limited by penalties. If you splash three shots in the beer in a row in quarters, draw a king in kings, or perform another equally impressive feat in your game of choice you're allowed to make a rule. Rules often involve not being able to swear, say someone's name, or any variation on the word drink/drunk. \nSome games like 21 develop completely on the fly. At first players just go around saying one to 21, but as you get to 21 you come up with a new word or action for the numbers for the next round until every number has an action. You could have to remember to play air guitar on one, hump the air on two, say 'I suck' on three and then have to remember 18 more to avoid drinking, but then again, isn't that the point. \nThis is just the tip of the iceberg though. There is no end to the amount of drinking games available, so combine rules, make your own game, and do whatever makes your beer gut shake with laughter and please, drink responsibly.
