Pass Out: The Adult Drinking Game

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By the late ‘60s, it had blown up, both on college campuses and with members of the American military, to whom Bresee marketed directly via hosting gigs on the Armed Forces Radio Network. This certainly has something to do with its pre-digital heyday, but you also have to wonder if the shifting public perceptions surrounding drinking have something to do with its current obscurity. When I woke up, I found it all written down,” says Bresee, who needed a second to catalog the creative output of the previous evening.

He's the author, with the editors of PUNCH, of How to Drink French Fluently (Ten Speed Press, 2017) and Session Cocktails (Ten Speed Press, 2018). Using a Magic Marker, Bresee began sketching out on the white tablecloth in front of him the beginnings of a board game based entirely around drinking, factoring in feedback from buzzed patrons who wandered over to see what he was doing. Bresee, who’s best known for his work as a radio host and historian, started off small, selling Pass-Out directly to retailers in his native Southern California. Everyone who catches their card can take another turn, however if someone passes out they get to be king and have an extra turn!

America has loosened up on many issues in the past 50+ years, but we’ve walked back some others, due in large part to experience. Her preferred drink to play with, in the early days, was a Greyhound: vodka and grapefruit juice over ice. Pass out is a board game that allows players to take over the roles of different animals on an animal farm. As each player makes a complete revolution around the board and passes the “START HERE” square, he may take a “PINK ELEPHANT” card.

igue twister printed thereon If the player makes a mistake in the reading of the card, he must rake a drink from his glass; and each subsequent time the player errs in reading the card he must take an additional drink, If the player, after 5 attempts, cannot read the card correctly, he nevertheless retains the “PINK ELEPHANT card, and the game continues. It’s hard to picture a game like Pass-Out —not to mention its marijuana-centric, never-released cousin, The Pot Game —hanging out on a Wal-Mart shelf next to Candyland and Clue in 2016. These positions have a lower chance of being blocked by an opponents piece, which makes them easier to defend. If the player, after 5 attempts, cannot read the card correctly, he nevertheless retains the “PINK ELEPHANT” card and the game continues. Correlating heavy alcohol consumption with harmless recreation, especially in the context of a candy-colored kit atop your kitchen table, is not an association everyone is comfortable making.

A player landing on a “Light-Up” square or drawing a “Light-Up” card, may, if he wishes, decline to smoke.