Drinking Buddies is a great 4-8 player drinking game by Wasted Minds. Unlike most other drinking games this one focuses on strategy and trying to out-wit your opponents to avoid losing the game and downing a bunch of shots of your drink.
How To Play
The goal of the game is to finish with the most shot glasses full. Other players will switch around teams and play action cards to try and get everyone else to finish their shots.
Setting it Up
Set up is pretty easy. Every player is given 5 shot glasses which they should immediately fill up with their drink of choice. Then each player is randomly given one of the Buddy Cards face up, which will represent their team.
After that each player is given 3 action cards which they should keep secret from the other players.
Playing the Game
On a players turn they get to do 2 things. Play an action card and grab a new Buddy card. These can be done in either order.
Playing an action
Once a turn you can play one of your action cards. Most of these cause a team to drink or refill a shot, so get your opponents to drink a shot and try to refill your own.
- Countering: If someone plays an action on you directly, you can respond by playing the exact same card if you have it. This reverses the effect and sends it back to whoever started it.
Playing a Buddy Card
These are pretty interesting because you can play them on yourself or another player. So you need to decide if you want to put yourself on someone else’s team, or change an opponents team and try to screw them over.
Winning the Game
Once someone has finished all their shot glasses in their flight the game is finished. The player with the most remaining is the winner.
Check out their Kickstarter Page.
Drinking Buddies Review
What’s great about this game is that it’s more strategic than almost any drinking game we’ve played. It’s a great alternative for people who like drinking games but don’t want to just flip cards and perform wacky stunts. This one actually requires some brain power to win the game.
One fault of the game is that there isn’t a terrible amount of variance in what you can do with the action cards. They basically all boil down to making a team fill or drink a shot or two, with some exceptions. Would have been nice to see more play effecting cards like turn skipping. But keeping the goal simple is definitely a good thing if you plan on being drunk.
Overall this is a great game for people who enjoy making strategic decisions. The game balances out pretty well in that you never really know who’s going to win until it happens. At the end of the game you end up with a table still full of shots, so I say just hand them all to the loser for being so inept at the game. That’ll teach em’. The Drinking Buddies Drinking Game is a great way to flex your brain and strain your liver all at the same time.