Drinking games: Everything old is new again

Call me and old fogie, but when I was in high school and of prime beer-game age, we didn’t play a ton of Beirut. (I’ve never figured out why anyone called beer pong Beirut, but in high school you don’t ask questions.) Now, apparently kids play so much of it that people are forced to make lists like a dozen popular drinking games not named beer pong. The list reads like a hazy walk down memory lane.

My rebel friends and I didn’t play because not a lot of people had ping-pong tables, and beer pong is a very messy game. If you need to clean up quick and hide evidence of drinking, getting rid of 25 cups is not an easy task.

No, our main game was quarters, specifically speed quarters. Regular quarters is a rather slow-moving game of bouncing one quarter into a glass of beer and handing off the glass, rinsing and repeating. Speed quarters, on the other hand, had more rules than golf. There were two quarters and three glasses and if you made a shot on your first try, you could pass one of the glasses anywhere you wanted; miss and you could only pass to left; the person drinking could never pass left, etc. The game just got harder as everyone got drunker and you’d mess up more, which led to more drinking. It all made sense back when you knew the host’s parents were going to be home in an hour.

When we had a little more time, we played mushrooms. I’m surprised mushrooms and other card-drinking games aren’t on the list. (Indian poker doesn’t count.) Mushrooms was great because it was a game of skill and memory. It has more rules than speed quarters, with the pleasant addition of “masters” such as thumb-master (master puts his thumb on the table and everybody has to follow suit, last one loses), question-master (must answer any questions from the question-master in question form). Every time someone drew a king they got to add a new rule.

It’s a nerdy drinking game which is right up my alley. Plus, mushrooms was played in sips. If you messed up you were assigned sips. But since I didn’t like warm Natty Light and since nobody knew what the heck 10 sips was supposed to be, you could take one sip and just hold the can up for a couple of seconds. 

Other than mushrooms, though, I was a terrible drinking-game player in high school. I didn’t like being forced to chug and was relieved, in college, to find people drinking socially over things like conversations. Since then I’ve played one or two rounds of flip-cup but have mostly abstained from games. Looking at that list and seeing games like baseball made me think I missed out and made me a little nostalgic. I am still down for a game of mushrooms if anyone plays that anymore.