The Wake

Whether you think drinking games are considered sports is debatable. However, some students make a living and fill their Monday-Saturday nights “practicing their craft.” Thus, Wake Athletics decided to give you a look at some of our favorite drinking games that can be played in a parking lot, basement or dungeon. Here are the some of the Wake’s favorites.

Editor’s Note: two students were harmed doing research for this story.

Beer Pong
Also known as Beirut on the East Coast, this game play is played using 20 16 ounce cups, 10 per team. The cups are placed in a triangular setup, and there are two players per team. Objective: sink the ball in the cups by throwing or bouncing.
Some 16-year-old kid outside of Des Moines, Iowa was sitting around in his parent’s basement 14 years ago, chugging his Dad’s OldStyle when his friend decided to create one of the best drinking games with nothing more than cups, ping pong balls and a table. The 16-year-old, we’ll call him Rich McDermott, was skeptical at first, but by the end of the game, he was pretending to surf on a chair while wearing a cowboy hat and singing “My Sharona”. The jury is still deciding, but we think it’s safe to assume that he had a good time.

Visit to choose from 21 different rule variations on this simple game.

Flip Cup
Also known as tippy cup, this game requires only a table (preferably 6-8 ft.) and 10-20 16 oz. cups. There are two teams, one on each side of the table. Hector Van Dumpsenstuff invented Flip Cup on wild night back in 1912, fusing two of man’s greatest inventions, beer and throw-away cups. His rules were simple, the team that finishes first wins. However, Flip Cup is like cockfighting, a lot of screaming, a short contest and neither side truly wins. Flip cup is perfect on game day, provided that you have access to a keg and a pitcher. All you need is a table and many 16 oz. cups.
The best part about this game is that many people can play – up to 20 – and the game allows plenty of opportunities for shit-talking.

Bags
Bean Bags were probably invented by some hard-partying college kid that worked at a local park and was sneaking booze on the job.
Bean Bags is played using two angled wooden boards propped up, with a circular hole cut in the middle of the board facing the thrower. Teams are comprised of two people, each throwing two bags per round.
Scoring varies, some people cancel points while others don’t. The game can be played to 11, 15 or 21. This game involves some skill but only four people can play.
Over the summer, students at the U were seen playing bean bags. Two hours and 36 Special Reserve Lights later, the same students were seen throwing the bean bags at one another and freestyle walking off of the angled boards used to play the game.

Ladder Golf aka Alligator Golf (aka Testicles On A Fence)
If the game of Horseshoes had a drunken embarrassment of a cousin who came to the family reunion’s wasted to make vulgar comments to wives and then passed out in the middle of the cakewalk, he’d be Ladder Golf. Ladder Golf or Alligator golf to anyone who loved alligator tag, is a game played with two golf balls attached by a piece of rope and a three rung “ladder” of PVC piping. It’s the kind of game best enjoyed on Easter morning after a breakfast of six Cadbury eggs and four Mai Tais. Each team of two switches off lobbing roped golf balls at two opposing ladders, the bottom, middle and top rungs each taking on a numeric level of both points and drinks. Seems easy enough right? Wrong. “Throwing two golf balls attached by rope while drunk is actually pretty fucking hard,” Chloe Fingermilk says, a freshman at the U. The wildcard in this game is the surprising amount of coordination and throwing skill it takes. “When you have to close one eye to be able to see the ladder, that’s when you know it’s been a good day” Brad Flosterstagg says, a part-time student and full-time Ladder Golf enthusiast. “The key is to not let the game control your life.”

Quarters
Somewhere deep inside the bong-rattled post-Nixon minds of the 1970s college students, someone got the idea that beer is easier to drink with shiny things inside it. Goldshlager’s appeal hadn’t yet come on full force and like crows we flocked to this new phenomenon of bling bling drinking, thus, Quarters was born. Perhaps the most effective drinking game of all time, Quarters is played with a cup filled with beer (or whiskey if you’re fucking crazy) and two-eight spirited youths. Each person takes turns attempting to bounce the quarter off the table and into the cup of beer. The winner gets the chance to give out the full cup of beer to another player for immediate consumption.

Now lets kick it up a notch. Speed Quarters or “Crack Quarters” is played with two quarters and two cups in addition to a beer reserve cup in the middle of the table. Each cup starts on an opposite side of the table and is passed in a circular motion. The point of Speed Quarters is to try to catch one cup up to the other to double up on somebody in which case they have one more try to make the quarter in or else they have to drink the cup and refill. I attempted to get some good quotes for this game, but plainly, the game just gets you too drunk. “ I’m so wasted,” one sophomore from the university claims after an hour of playing the game. Her friend states, “I don’t want to play anymore.” Later, she spit up on herself midgame … yes, we know, its not all fun in games in the world of competitive drinking, but you swallow that vomit, and you live to play again.