One evening, about a year and a half ago, my friends and I
went out for margaritas on a Tuesday night. The Hunger Games was everywhere and
we were all trying to decide what to do for Memorial Day weekend.
After a few margaritas we had an idea, a marvelous, stupid,
crazy idea.
What started out as a discussion for a bar crawl transformed
into a no-holds-barred drinking melee, which we fondly refer to as The 1st
Annual 74th Annual Drunker Games.
The first year the concept was that each team was given a
route to get through. You must go to all the bars (7 total) and each team
member must drink a pint of beer. At the end of the beers, you have to take a
picture of your finished pint glasses and then go/sprint to the next bar. All
teams after their third bar were then forced to go to a mid-point bar. At this
bar a new rule was introduced: Tributing. One person on the team can volunteer
as tribute and take four shots. The four shots must be consumed in tandem with
the four pints the rest of your team has to drink.
If you “tribute” a bar, then you are allowed to skip the
next bar. Simple and dumb.
The results were pretty mixed. My team wasn’t super
competitive, so we kind of took it easy, two of us tributed, and by the end of
the crawl we were all a little drunk, but nothing crazy.
Other teams, however, took the contest very seriously. This
is why my roommate was sprawled on our back deck at 6 in the evening, after
completing the entire course in roughly two hours.
We all had a great time and agreed that this year we would,
obviously, have to have a Quarter Quell.
My friends and I wanted to make the event bigger this year,
but recruiting for a four-hour, fast-paced, shot-taking bar sprint is tougher
than one would imagine.
One of the best parts of this whole thing is that we wanted
to revise the rules for the new games. Just like the book, I wanted each games
to be unique. While working at my job, which requires roughly .23% of my brain
power, I had a revelation. I had the idea that we should make a point system
for each bar (bars are worth 6,8, and 10 points depending on location) and then
have tributing double the point totals for a bar. So, you can go to a
four-point bar, tribute and get 8 points. I also had the…good?...idea of
creating The Massacre. A Massacre is when not just one, but the entire team
takes four shots of booze and has to drink the four pints of alcohol. This
leads to triple the points for a bar. Did I create this rule merely to bait my
roommate to see if he was crazy enough to do it?
Yup.
The other two gamemakers and I perfected the scheme, made
the maps, and were all ready to go.
While planning the games I was explaining the concept and
this happened:
Me: “I think we
should have the total be 50 points.”
Friend: “Whoa. Only fifty? I mean… All you have to do is go
to like three bars and massacre two of them.”
Me: “…Do you realize what the massacre entails?”
Friend: “Yeah. You just have the team do four shots per
person.”
Me: “Per person. And each team must have a girl.”
Friend: “Yeah.”
Me: “So a girl is
going to have to take eight shots of hard alcohol and drink 3 pints of beer in
an hour and a half…”
Friend: “Yeah.”
For some reason no one was getting the concept that drinking
eight shots of hard alcohol is going to be hard for ANYONE. I mean, my friends
and I are established drinkers, but… But…
Eventually I talked everyone off the ledge and we had the
fifty point total. At the conclusion of the games I couldn’t help but bring it
up again.
“Remember when y’all wanted to just massacre every bar?”
My friend who won the games, his eyes heavily glazed over,
says, “Waddya what are the what?”
This year we added a couple of new things to the Games. Yes,
we do open the games with a team 40 chug. You are not allowed to enter the
Cornucopia for prizes until your team has successfully chugged a King Cobra.
The Cornucopia is a bunch of Gatorades, waters, crackers, and “bonuses” in
envelopes. The bonuses were things like, “Your team gets +3 to begin.” I didn’t
want people swooping and stealing all of the prizes, so roughly 70% of the
bonuses were actually negatives. I am evil.
We also had the Opening Ceremonies this year, which
consisted of 6 drinking game events, including Beer
Ball, Sink the Bismarck,
Beer Pong, Flip Cup, Kings, and To Mordor, which put all the teams against each
other in matches of drinking valor. Each team who won, or lost, depending on
the game, was awarded a bonus prize from above. The Ceremonies also included a
Costume Contest that included a team of lumberjacks and my one friend bought
presidents masks like the robbers in Point Break.
The day was super successful, but one of my favorite parts
of this event was running into one of the new teams at the second to last bar.
It was 2 guys and their girlfriends who only knew my one friend. They were all
absolutely trashed and we all became instant best friends.
One of the guys felt it necessary to pull me aside and say, “Man,
your speech to open the games was great. It was like really inspiring.”
My speech went something like this:
“Anyone have questions? Okay. GO! Drink your 40s!”
By the end of the night my one friends had pulled me aside
and swore that were he a homosexual, we most
certainly would have dated, I
confided in my other friend that I think she was the prettiest of all my
friends, and I then proceeded to do sit-ups in the street to mock the firemen,
who were working out across the street.
Another successful Drunker Games.
If you want to sign up for next year, you can email me and
let me know. While I doubt anyone will, I have a feeling that Miley would join
in, should she become my best friend...as was my only New Year's resolution for 2013:
