Bar Games: Fun with a Twist

For centuries bar games have made going out drinking with buddies that much more fun. The earliest reference to drinking games in Western literature can be traced all the way back to Plato's Symposium The Drinking Party. The game was simple: fill a bowl with wine, drink it, and pass it on to the next person. Kottabos is one of the earliest known drinking games from ancient Greece, dated to the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Players would use dregs to hit targets across the room with their wine. Often, there were special prizes and penalties for one's performance in the game. Today’s bar games often follow a version of the International Drinking Rules, and the objectives are to either simply drink competitively for speed or to win via others becoming too drunk to function. The participants in these games are primarily college students, young adults and high school students, as well as those who are attending bachelor parties. Although they’ve been criticized for glamorizing drinking, bar games have become rituals at many establishments throughout the world—for a good time they can’t be beat.