Pop Open A Beer and Pour Yourself A Shot: Board Games With a Twist

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, eyes quite bleary, Over many a quaint and curious game requiring pour. While I imbibed, nearly chugging, suddenly there came a tugging, As of my beverage gently drugging, dragging me to my bathroom door.

Heyo, friends! It’s not often we pull back the curtain on the writing process here at BoLS, but I’m going to level with you. Sometimes I don’t know what to write about. So, I had myself a thought. “Grab a drink and something will come to you.” Suddenly, in a spark of inspiration, I had an inspiration which was inspiring. Write about drinking games!

So, with gin in hand, here are a few of my favorite ways to ‘drink-ify’ our favorite board games.

Jenga- Or Any Dexterity Game  Really

This one is pretty obvious, really. With a bit of the juice, minute movements become difficult. So what’s better than the most anxiety inducing game added with a little buzz? Not much, I think.

But a proper drinking game needs an incentive to drink during the game. So you have two options here:

Hardcore Mode

You can pick a few select blocks and use a Sharpie to write on the block itself. You can either write just “take a drink!” or anything else that suits your fancy. Whomsoever pulls the block from the tower shall be named the Drinker of all Britons. Or whatever the name of your apartment complex is.

If you’re willing to go all out, throw in a few more wild and crazy dares for the unlucky puller to do.

Sensible Mode

Let people drink at their own pace and just let the flow of Jenga happen. If you got a good group of people the fun will create itself. Some people think drinking games need tons of rules and regulations. Not so. Plenty of games are just enhanced with the inclusion of alcohol. Jenga is one such game.

Unaccomplished Game of Life

We all wish we had accomplished more in life. But why not take a good hard look at your own life and judge how well you’re doing based on a very old board game?! I can’t think of a reason to not do that.

In Unaccomplished Game of Life you play as per usual, but as soon as you land on an event space which dictates a life event you have not yet done yourself, you drink! If you want to lament on your shortcomings on not having won a photography contest, that’s up to you. It’s kinda of like ‘never have I ever’, but with way more bizarre events.

Monopoly but Money is Drinks

There’s certainly plenty of ways to make Monopoly work as a drinking game, but this is one way I think works best.

You don’t get to purchase properties outright. Every time a property is landed on, it immediately goes up for auction. Rather than auction with money… (can you guess?), they auction with drinks!

Although, from here there are a variety of ways to make this work:

1. Typical auction rules. Bids start low and players offer how much they are willing to ‘pay’ to gain the property. Highest bid wins the property and drinks the noted amount.
2. Waterfall auction. Everyone grabs their drink and starts chugging, holding out for as long as they can stand. The last person still drinking gains the property.
3. Doubly reversed auction. Bids start high. Players bid for each other. Whenever a bid is placed (i.e. “Person A, drink for 6 seconds”), that person can bid lower for someone else (i.e. “Person B, drink for 5 seconds”). The idea being to balance how cheaply you’re willing to let someone else gain the property while also balancing your own ability to drink.

Drunkards of Catan

This is a rule set variant for Settlers of Catan that I came up with a few years ago and have really enjoyed.

It’s admittedly much more involved than the other options presented here, which I did earlier say that drinking games don’t always need lots of rules, but that’s in the past. We live in the now.

This is meant to be less of a ‘drinking game’ and more of a ‘game with drinks’. I think it balances pretty well and has a neat risk vs reward system with the festivals. What’s especially neat about this is it spawned the drinking board games subreddit, which admittedly is pretty dead. But still, I indirectly caused the creation of a subreddit. So, that’s neat.

Bang! The Drinking Game

I bring that subreddit stuff up mostly as a point of self-flattery, but also because it’s an easy way to add one more entry to this article.

Bang! The Drinking Game is the top post of the drinking board games subreddit, and the rules are pretty simple.

• If you get hit: Take a drink
• If you play a miss: Player who shot at you takes a drink
• Play a beer: Take a drink
• Play general store: Everybody drinks
• If you are in prison: Take a drink every time the sheriff takes a drink until you get out.
• Dynamite: Put an empty glass in the middle of the table, every time the dynamite does not explode and is passed, that person puts a bit of his/her drink in the glass. When the dynamite explodes, that person must drink the entire content of the glass.
• If you get killed: finish your drink

Thanks to mrtntrm for their contribution.

Final Thoughts

Overall, games are about having fun in whatever way you want. If that means not drinking and having a fun night with friends, that’s totally cool! If knocking back a few while playing some games is more your speed, then that’s cool too!

All fun is valid!

Please game responsibly.

Author: Matt Sall

Matt has loved games of all kinds his whole life: board, video, war, roleplaying, and card. He's worked as a writer for BoLS since 2017.