"You have a little over two weeks to create a game. The only rule is that the game has to be fun. That means you can create anything you want, board game, card game, role playing game, even a video game if you're crazy enough."

 

That was one fo the assignments Jesse Schell gave us for his Game Design class. I decided to make a drinking game. 

 

I've always been fascinated by drinking games; they are one of the most unique challenges in game design. Not only does the game have to be fun, easily understood, and well balanced, it also has to made using pieces commonly found around the house, adaptable to whatever extra rules people want to add, and the best drinking game allow people to join in and leave whenever they want.

 

And so I set out to create a great drinking game. I started out by writing down every drinking game I could think of and listing it's attributes; things like, too much drinking, low number of players, too slow, no competition, too complex, etc. From this I found a few games that I wanted to emulate, pong, chandelier cup, and quarters. So I started rapidly prototyping by randomly making up rules with a project mate until we had a semi-fun first version. This is what I took to a party at my alma-mater to playtest.

 

That was only one of 5 playtests that I conducted over the course of the two week time period we had to make the game. I ended up dividing the playtests into two groups; sober and drunk, that way I could playtest the game as it was meant to be played to see if it was any fun, but also have a time were I could focus on rules changes and balancing. 

 

The rules and photo above represent the final version. Also below is a link to download the long form write up of the game.