Beer Games – Part Three

Beer Pong

So successful has our series on beer games been (I even had one comment on the last instalment, thanks Zak!) that I have decided to continue it. Partly because there are plenty of beer drinking based games around but mostly because the games, and researching and writing about them is just so much fun. Today we look at the American College students’ favourite drinking game, Beer Pong.

I have only a vague recollection of this game from my younger days and I only ever heard about it and never actually saw it played. It is full on in the States and they hold tournaments and everything. I have been researching these games topics extensively of late and I have come to realise that the US is not just another country, it’s a whole other universe. Nowhere have I come across so many differences between Americans and normal people and it has prompted me to put together a post regarding the various amusing dissimilarities. Stay tuned. But don’t let on to the Yanks, OK? The ones who I know and who love their beer are good people.

Back to beer pong. The game itself is simple. A number of plastic cups are set up in a triangular formation in front of each team of two players. Six, twelve or fifteen cups seems to be the standard and each team may have two, three or four members. The cups are filled with beer and teams take turns to throw ping pong balls at the opposition cups. When a ball is landed, the opposition has to drink that cup’s contents. The game is won by the team who can make the opposition drink all their cups. The ‘punishment ‘ for losing is that you must then drink any of the winning teams remaining beers.

The rules vary from high school to high school, Uni to Uni and from State to State and even from pub to pub with paddles being used by some to hit the ball and some use quarters instead of balls. Why you’d want to play with coins that have quite conceivably found a recent home in a beggars’ bumcrack, I don’t know. I guess if you are using Bud for the beer, it may give the stuff some semblance of flavour.

I have found some interesting features on Wikipedia which I shall be very slack about and copy here. Check out just how fair dinkum these blokes get about this game;
There are four major ways to shoot in beer pong:

Arc - The most common throwing technique is to grasp the ping pong ball with the tips of the thumb and forefinger of the player's dominant hand, and hold the arm at an angle with the ball upwards, then throw by using gentle elbow motion, holding the upper arm parallel with the table. The arc motion allows one to put enough force on the ball to get it to the other side of the table, while conserving velocity and slowing it down so that it is not as likely to bounce off the rim of the cup but gently roll into the cup.

Fastball - Some players throw "fastball" style, also known as "throwing darts", which uses more of a hard chopping motion to send the ball in a more direct line to the intended target cup. This can be done with the hand in the usual "pistol grip" orientation or in an overhand "slam-dunk" orientation. The fastball is especially favored by taller players, as it is easier to throw from a higher position. Due to the straighter path the ball will follow, the player may feel more confident in hitting using the fastball. Fastballs are also much more likely to knock down a cup, which may have positive or negative consequences depending on house rules. As noted above, the higher horizontal velocity of the ball will also cause less-precise shots to bounce off the rim rather than gently bounce into a cup.

Bounce - A bounce is performed by bouncing the ball toward the cups. Since the other team has the opportunity to swat away a bounced ball, a bounce is usually worth two cups. The "muck" bounce is a low trajectory shot achieved by bouncing the ball in a sideways motion as opposed to overhand. This shot is particularly effective because in addition to being difficult to block, it leaves the opportunity for the other team to knock cups over. In some house rules, the bounce shot is not allowed.

Underhand - This technique is best when there are still many cups left on the table, because it is hard to control the left to right movement, but is very good for achieving the desired distance. Use of this technique is often against house rules. Australian readers see TREVOR CHAPPELL

I even found the standard regulations for table dimensions including the height from the ground to the top of the table, as listed in The World Series of Beer Pong! Can you believe how fair dinkum these guys get? It’s a drinking game, not an Olympic sport!!

It appears that alongside the standard set up for play and turn taking is a standard guideline for the amount of beer in total to be used per round – two cans (total) of light or low strength beer! that’s light as in low carb and low strength as in light alcohol beer. Two cans!? No wonder it hasn’t taken off here. Can you imagine the Australian Variation Rules for an International series?

We would have VB for the Vics and Toohey’s for the Cockroaches, XXXX for the Cane Toads and West End for the Crow Eaters. Cascade for the Taswegians and ‘Big Chook Piss’ (Emu Lager) for the Drug Dealers, sorry, Sandgropers. The regional finals would be played as Day/Nighters with the Final at the ‘G on the day after the Grand Final. The TAB would want in on this, of course, and we’d have professional handicappers setting the markets. Good teams would have to drink strong lagers like Platinum Extra Dry, average teams could drink light and the token Gay Pride Team could drink wine spritzers, Bacardi Breezers or Coronas.

The Yanks have a whole section in the rule book about defence; sorry, ‘dee-fence’ which is divided into sections on ‘psychological’, ‘blowing and fingering’ (!??!) and ‘ball blocking’. All of these, I assume, are legal in all but three States. Psychological defence, or ‘shit-talking’ consists of abuse, distracting visual cues and arm waving and grotesque facial expressions. As for the second section, I’ll let the Americans explain it for themselves;

Blowing/fingering - If the ball is spinning inside of a cup, players may either blow into the cup or put a finger in the cup it out in an attempt to make the ball fly out before it touches the liquid. Once the ball stops spinning, it is considered "dead", and no further defensive actions will count. Frequently, only females are allowed to blow, while men are allowed to finger. Note that some rules disallow such actions and count them as goaltending.

Now that’s funnier than anything I could have written.

Ball blocking is NOT, as you may think, what English soccer players do when preparing to defend a free kick but beer pong players swatting the ball away before it gets to their cups. Of beer. Some rules allow for all out blocking while others say it can only be done on a second bounce shot. I think they probably have a ‘one hand off the shed’ rule, too. If a player knocks beers over when blocking, he has to drink those cups. What!? They’re knocked over! Unless you’re playing with beer-jello, the cup should probably be empty. If we were to play this game then anyone knocking beer over would be labelled a ‘dickhead and sent from the table immediately.

Speaking of dickheads, Anheuser-Busch brought out a ‘Bud Pong’ game kit in 2005. They claimed that the game was not meant to encourage under age or binge drinking because the game was intended for use in bars and not campuses and because its rules called for the use of WATER instead of beer. But it is designed to be played in bars. With water. What the ...!?

Now, like ‘jumbo shrimp’ or ‘military intelligence’ this seems a little like a double negative in its very lunacy. Why does a brewery promote and distribute a game that discourages beer drinking? Why does a brewery think that a drinking game will NOT be used for drinking beer? Why does the Marketing Department of said brewery proclaim surprise when told that teenagers were using this drinking game to drink beer? Because, as I said, they are dickheads. It’s another sad case of a brewery being about the money instead of being about the beer.

Having said all that, let’s get behind any attempt to bring an international series to these shores, or support a touring team to go to the States and take on their best. After all, this drinking game business is something that we have become pretty competent at in our past. We’ll whip their skanky-yanky arses.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Beer Games Part Two

I was reminded, while reading over previous articles, about great drinking games. I was somewhat mortified to realise that I had omitted the most interesting and action packed drinking game ever invented. Well, that may be a slight exaggeration, but when I was playing it I was fairly lagered and it was very, very funny. The game is called ‘The Beer Hunter"’

This drinking game is based on the Academy Award© winning movie of the same name which starred Robert DeNiro, Jon Voight Merryl Streep and John Savage. A cracker of a film and one which I would recommend to all Blokes and Blokettes. It centres on a group of friends from a small American steel town who are sent to Vietnam. The story focuses on their return to the States and the difficulties they face in re-entering the real world after what they experienced as prisoners of the Viet Cong. The ‘key’ scene involves the men being forced to participate in tournaments of Russian roulette for the amusement and gambling fun of their captors. It’s a pretty dark and moody piece of cinema and I don’t want to spoil the plot or bring down the mood too much here so we’ll move on.

The Beer Hunter is loosely based on the Russian roulette theme. You will need about six players, a table, some hand towels and beer in cans. They must be cans. And there must be as many cans as there are players multiplied by the number of rounds you want to play. The game play is simple. Half a dozen cans are lined up in a neat line on the table. One player is selected, voted or volunteers to stay behind in the room while the other players, or Beer Hunters, leave the room.

While the Beer Hunters are away, the remaining player, the ‘Viet Cong’ officer, selects ONE of the cans and vigorously shakes the bejesus* out of it until it is fit to pop. He then returns the can to the line and calls the Beer Hunters back into the room. If you have the movie soundtrack it would help the mood enormously if you hit the play button now. Some discipline and military timing is required at this point as well. The Beer Hunters must approach the table without stalling and choose a can each. Without any hesitation they put their chosen can to their ear and ‘pull the trigger’ – open the can.

All but one Beer Hunter will then sip sweet, sweet amber nectar from their cans while one Hunter will reach for the hand towel and realise that one side of his head looks like the hairdressers model for a 1980’s electronic poofter band. The other players may find it difficult to enjoy their beers as they will possibly be pissing themselves at their mate’s plight. And the fact that he looks like the keyboard player from Kaga Goo Goo.

It would also assist in creating a veil of realism to the game if the person playing the Viet Cong officer could yell at the Beer Hunters excitedly in an exaggerated high pitched Vietnamese accent. "You play, you play" and "Diddi Mao!! DiddiMao!! should work well. If he is OK with it, get him to wave a revolver menacingly as he shouts, though if you are in a public place, say a picnic ground or well attended international sporting event, this may need to be revised. And stick to aggressive movie Vietnamese expressions like those I have suggested. The mood will crumble if you channel the wrong movie and come out with "Me lub you long time soldierboy!" or "You likey me, Mister?"

It may seem odd for me to be promoting a game in which beer is wantonly sacrificed for the amusement of others but I don’t do it very often and, as I said, it really is pretty funny. You could always overcome this dilemma by using a can of cheap and nasty beer as the ‘shaker’ (no, neither Carlton Cold nor Corona come in cans) as long as you mask all the cans in the same fashion. If you don’t disguise the cans and you choose to use crap beer, then you will all have to drink it. And that would be irresponsible of me.

If you know of any other beer games you know where I hang out.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

* You won’t believe it but when I first drafted this piece I used the word ‘shite’ and the spell check had a fit, yet when I changed it to ‘bejesus’ it let it through. How the fricken’# heck does that work?

# It didn’t like fricken neither. I have added this and shite to my computers dictionary and I suggest you make a stand for real language and do the same.

Beer Drinking Games

As promised in a previous beer game-related article, I will neither encourage nor glorify irresponsible drinking. I will however, gladly share with the readers the many wonderful games which may happen to involve drinking. I just hope that people don’t misuse this knowledge and get dangerously silly playing them. But have a little silly by all means. Life is too short.
Let’s begin with some standard drinking games and their rules and highlights. I will also give ratings based on the playability and danger aspects of each.

TV based games.

There have been a few of these developed in recent times and they are easy to play. But beware, they can easily descend into lager-fuelled madness if you are not careful. The rules are simple; pick a TV show and sit all participants evenly around the television set. Decide on three or four ‘cues’ that players must be alert to. Upon identification of the ‘cue’, all players must drink – amounts to be decided upon beforehand. Repeat until program has concluded or when all beer has been exhausted. Or when all players have been exhausted.

Here are a few examples. And a few warnings. Home & Away. Players must skol a beer every time Alf says ’Flamin’ or ‘Strewth’ or each time a young & dumb girl gives a shocked or vacant stare upon hearing some life-changing news in the surf club cafe which is accompanied by foreboding background music. Sea Patrol. Drink every time the ships propeller is seen winding up or when someone uses the ships radio. Law & Order. Players drink every time the deep tonal two note BOOM- BOOM is heard. Do not apply this game style to Big Brother if you decide to drink whenever someone says anything banal or inane.

Physical Games.

My personal favourite is Dent The Can. A simple game in which an empty can is taken by a player and bashed into his or her own forehead. The can is then passed to the person on his or her left. This player repeats the forehead bashing. On their own forehead. The can is passed again to the left. The first person to bleed wins.

Word based games.

These can be the most fun you can have while drinking because the chances of someone cocking up and saying something hilariously funny and stupid is not only high but these chances increase as the game goes on.

I went to the Shop ... This game is a simple memory based word game in which players create a shopping list which is added to at each turn. The first player begins the game by saying; ‘ I went to the shop and I bought an apple’. The next player adds an item as well as repeating the first, i.e.; ‘ I went to the shop and I bought an apple AND a banana’. Players take turns, each adding a new item and repeating each preceding item until someone stuffs up. Then they have to drink. The game is made more interesting by changing the shopping location to, say, The Marital Aids Warehouse, from which players can choose from such fun supplies as ‘a Jumbo tub of Keep-It-Up-Cream’ or ‘King Kong Butt Plug’.

Categories. Nice and simple but very enjoyable once participants have had a few. Just pick a category and each player gives one example in turn until someone repeats an example or cannot think of one. E.g. Car Manufacturers; Holden, Ford, Lada, etc. Or Brownlow Medallists; Skilton, Hird, Dipierdomenico. Or words for Boobies; Yar-Yars, Funbags, Norcs. This is also a great game to play with kids as it improves word skills and vocabulary volume.

The best drinking game of all, however, is ZOOM. Beautifully constructed, intricately regulated and intoxicatingly addictive, ZOOM combines every necessary element to ensure hours of lager frenzy, full-bore, fall-over drunk fun. And then some.

The game is played thusly. A Grand Poo Bah is nominated and he or she controls the game. The Poo Bah can abdicate at any break in the game. The game is broken up into innings which are controlled by the Pooh Bah. Each innings is divided into top and bottom halves. The Grand Pooh Bah begins the frivolities by saying; "It’s the bottom of the first, the ball is live and ...( He looks into the eyes of any one player and says...) ZOOM! The play is now in the hands of the person who has been ‘zoomed’.

This player has THREE options. He can ZOOM any player except the player who has ‘zoomed’ him, he can play the ‘ball’ back to the player who ‘zoomed’ him by saying SCHWARTZ, or he can ‘sell the dummy’ by looking at another player and by saying PERFIGLIANO thus returning the ‘ball’ to the person who actually ‘zoomed’ him. Simple, eh? But wait, there’s more.
You cannot ZOOM a ZOOMER, you cannot SCHWARTZ anyone except the person who just ZOOMed you and you can only PERFIGLIANO a player other than the one who just ZOOMed, SCHWARTZed or PERFIGLIANO’d you. These indiscretions will cost you a drink. Get it? But I know you want more!

At all times during the game the following rules are in permanent effect. You cannot swear or point your finger. That’ll cost you a drink. Pointing must be effected by raising your elbow in the direction of the player you are accusing. If you are deemed to have made a false accusation, that’ll cost you a drink. Swearing because you failed to correctly accuse, that’ll cost you a drink. If your ZOOM, SCHWARTZ or PERFIGLIANO is deemed to be either ambiguous, that is, not directly directed in the exact direction of the intended recipient, or too slow, you will be found guilty of CHINESE EYES or GROSS HESITATION respectively. Either of which will cost you a drink.

In addition, the Grand Pooh Bah must correctly ‘call’ each phase of play. Beginning with the bottom of the first, he will follow with the top of the first, then the bottom of the second, top of the second, bottom of the third, top of the third, etc. He may wish to deliberately throw in a fake call – in other words, go from the top of the fifth to the bottom of the seventh for example – to either see if players are concentrating, or because he is thirsty and wants to have a drink.

The Grand Pooh Bah must also have the final verdict on any and all accusations and challenges.

This is possibly the most entertaining game to play or watch in the history of interesting games to ply or watch and can be enjoyed on many levels. The pointing, the swearing, the drinking, the gross hesitations, the tongue-twisting, the drinking, the Chinese eyes, the drinking, the Pooh Bah-ing, the falling over and the drinking. This game is not for the faint of heart. But it is fun.

Feel free to send in your own favourite drinking games and any match reviews of games you might try as a result of seeing them described here. Good luck and good drinking.

Beer Blokes.

Beer Games

We don’t like to sit on our laurels here at Beer Blokes – mainly because we don’t have any laurels. Actually we don’t really know what a laurel is. Is it a bit like a flowers? No, that’s florals. Isn’t it the fat bloke in the old movies with Hardy? Anyway, we don’t rest on them.

We begin a new series here where we will review and rate beer. What’s that I hear you say, “But Professor, you already provide some of the most insightful and informative treatises on beer in the world ever! What could you mean?” Good question and here is a good response. This time we will endeavour to document, in every detail, the wonderful world of beer games.

I have recently enjoyed some quality time with beer in the form of online beer related interactive games. And, as it always seems to do, beer got me thinking. As a young man, I enjoyed the fun and frivolity of drinking games – challenging your mates and your own limitations and looking forward to seeing who would chuck first, but I don’t want to be seen to be encouraging irresponsible consumption of alcohol in any form. Don’t need that sort of heat.

Instead, in this first instalment of the new series, I will look at online beer games only. Regular readers of this nonsense will know that I am partial to the odd product or twenty from Launceston in Tasmania – that’s the floaty-away bit underneath the land down under for our overseas readers – specifically the fine beers from J Boag & Son. Boags Draught is something of the lifeblood of the Beer Blokes Brewing Co. because it is reasonably priced, the labels come off in seconds under hot water and it is a damned fine beer. They also have a very good website.

You may have seen or heard of the Boag’s advertising initiative ‘Tester Reserve’. This is a neatly produced advertising campaign based around the average bloke signing up as a reservist taste tester for Boag’s Draught. You get some dog tags and the odd e-mail and access to a very good interactive section of the website. And you are encouraged to test beer regularly.

The first beer game is a mission simulator in which reservists must move through an animated/comic strip type scenario to get to the beer. Along the way you get harassed by bouncers at the door, the old chook selling tickets for the meat tray raffle, the pissed old bloke tellin’ stories and so on. At each interruption you have to choose from three options – one of which will move you along quickly, the others will either delay you or cost you cash, or end the simulation.

Beer Bloke Rating; Playablity – Very Easy. Fun Factor; Very High. Boobies Value – Some Cartoon Cleavage. Overall; Highly recommended.

The newest addition to the section is the Interactive Pub Crawl in which reservists just have to get to the pub. Then the next. And the next. And pick up a mate along the way. And avoid the traps like the God Botherer, the Bouncer, the Annoying Ex-Girlfriend, the dog turds and pot holes. You can also pick up extra points by collecting stubbies, dog tags, stars and stuff along the way. Slabs of Draught are also parachuted into the combat zone for added excitement and bonus points.

Easy to play, this game is a cracker. The animation/digital photo combo works a treat and the military style wargame set up is great. The only drawback is that, as the game goes on and you try to knock off the top score, the game can get ‘staggery’ and slows right down if too much is happening when you are trailing along all four mates. In fact, it becomes like a real pub crawl, in that you begin smoothly and then everything suddenly sows right down and the whole thing becomes a game of stamina instead of skill. Or itcould just be my PC.

Slabs and Draught merch are up for grabs and just getting a score in the top twenty or so is a feat to be proud of. My best is 29th so far and I am NOT happy. But I did win a shirt.

Beer Bloke Rating; Playability – Easy early on. Gets a tad annoying as you get further in. Fun Factor – Very High. A good laugh. Boobies Value – None. Overall. Recommended.

So get on board and have a crack – think carefully before deciding what to do at the pool table in the Mission Simulator! – and see what you think. Good beer fun for all.

If any Blokes out there know of any beer games – or any online games that could be beer related (like, you could have a beer whilst or after playing) let the Blokes know and we will road test them.