Attention all English and journalism majors: it’s time to play a drinking game all about the size of your vocabulary. Do you get teased for playing Text Twist? Do you idolize good ol’ Billy Shakespeare? Then get your drank on with Spew, a game enjoyable for its simplicity and hilarity.
The Supplies:
Beer or mixed drinks
A deck of cards
A circle of people, preferably your friends
The Game:
The rules of the game are simple: Players sit in a circle, and the dealer picks two people (sitting next to each other) to go head-to-head. The dealer then flips a card, and the two people have to say a word that starts with the same letter as the number on the card. So if you draw a five, you have to shout out words that start with “f,” like fizzle or flagella.
The first person to yell out a word wins the card and moves on to face the next person in the circle, while the loser takes a sip from their drink. Winners keep the card they won. At the end of the game, everyone counts their cards. Whoever has the most is the grand champion.
That’s pretty much it. It sounds almost too simple when first explained, but translating a number into a letter, and then into a word, is not as easy as you’d imagine. Often players are reduced to loud yelling sounds and syllables that never quite make it into words. Which is funny. And then they have to drink.
Clarifying rules:
The word you say can’t be a number, so if the card comes up a three, saying thirty or three hundred doesn’t cut it. It’s also illegal to use any proper names, or a word that has already won, though you can reuse losing words.
Depending on the size of the group, there is relatively little drinking involved in this game: only one sip each time you lose. So it makes it a great game to play with mixed drinks, unlike mixed-drink beer pong, which can end in bad times all around.