Historical Drinking Games from Around the Globe

No one knows how old drinking games are. They're probably as old as alcohol itself. In the past, people had lots of festivals and celebrations so they invented various games to pass the time. Nowadays drinking games have a softer version where instead of wine or beer people can drink juice if they're not into alcoholic beverages. However, back in the day alcohol was synonymous with drinking games.

Drinking games and college parties go hand in hand as much as the latest sports odds and punters. In college, you learn how to enhance your skills and through betting, you increase your chances of earning a reward. Besides teaching the skills to pay the bills, some colleges even had their drinking games. Without further ado, here are a few drinking games played throughout history:

Sumbel

Sumbel is an occasion embedded in Nordic tradition. On this occasion, everyone would toast and take a drink before passing the cup to another person. The traditional version of this ritual was done with mead in a horn, but other drinks like wine or beer were acceptable. Every toast had to be a passionate one so they would swallow the words they said by drinking from the horn.

Pennying

As mentioned before, both Oxford and Cambridge argue over who created this drinking game. The concept is pretty simple: you sneak a penny into a person's cup and they have to drink it to save the drowning queen, as British pennies have the face of the queen engraved on them. Like most coin drinking games nowadays, this traditional one had strict rules. Double pennying was forbidden and the person who did it had to drink a cup.

Pitch-pot

This game originated in China during the Warring States period. This game also has a simple concept as the objective is to throw arrows into a pot. The distance is usually two and a half arrows, and people take turns trying to score. When a contestant manages to throw an arrow inside they are presented with a cup to drink. The game was also popular in Korea and Japan.

Sconcing

Nowadays college students might enjoy a drinking game based on Family Guy, Friends or any other TV show. Unlike them, Oxford students in the 17th century enjoyed a good game of sconcing. Sconcing was a fine for misdemeanor. The drinking game had a simple rule: a person could be sconced for a breach of etiquette and their fine would be downing a beer on the challenger's expense. If the student could finish it in one go then they'd have to pay for it.

Kottabos

Ancient Greeks knew how to party! Kottabos was a frequent game at their symposiums. There are two ways you could play this game: the first is by trying to knock off a disk carefully placed on a metal stand and the second way is to fill a dish with enough dregs to sink it so you can drink it. Either way, the game left quite a mess that the servants were stuck with. In January 2015 a reenactment of the game was done, but instead of wine participants played with juice.