Pre-drinks games that actually work

Pre-drinks is the hardest hour of the night to get right, and almost nobody plans for it.

People arrive across ninety minutes. The room doubles in size twice. Half of it is standing, half is on the floor, and everyone is half-watching the group chat. Any game that needs a fixed roster, a table, or everyone's full attention is fighting the shape of the hour and will lose.

What survives has four properties. Learn these and you can invent your own.

• You can join halfway through. Someone will walk in mid-round. They should be playing within ten seconds.
• It works standing. If it needs a table it is competing with the drinks.
• It survives a room split across two spaces. Kitchen and sofa, always.
• Nobody has to run it. The second one person becomes the games organiser, they have stopped being at the party.

The waiting-for-people phase

First forty minutes. Four or five people, low energy, everyone slightly on their phone. You do not need a game here so much as a reason to talk. Keep it light and keep it droppable.

• Secret missions Everyone who is here gets one private task to pull off tonight. Get someone to teach you a dance move. Get three people to laugh at the same joke. Find out which two people in this room have met before. New arrivals get one at the door. It scales from four people to twenty without restarting, which is the entire problem with pre-drinks solved.
• Guess the price Someone pulls up an unhinged listing. Everyone guesses what it costs. Closest wins. Zero setup, works with three people, survives everyone looking away.
• Rank it Five things — nightclubs, biscuits, decades, ways to be dumped. The group has to agree one ranking out loud with no vote. Fast, argumentative, and instantly restartable with a new category when someone new walks in.
• The banned word Pick a word at the start. Everyone caught saying it owes something. Tell people the word as they arrive. Runs all night on no maintenance and needs nobody's attention.
• Playlist duel Two people alternate tracks, each trying to beat the last. The room votes with its feet. Then it quietly becomes the music for the rest of pre-drinks and you never have to end it.

Once everyone's actually here

Room is full, energy is up, you have maybe thirty minutes before people start talking about leaving. This is the window for something with a shape to it.

• Fingers Ten fingers up, put one down if it applies. Everyone already knows it, people can join mid-round, and nothing has to be explained.
• Contact One person thinks of a word and gives its first letter. Everyone else tries to guess it by describing other words starting with that letter — if two people land on the same word, the thinker has to reveal the next letter. Sounds complicated, takes thirty seconds to teach, and is the best standing-up word game there is.
• Reverse charades The group acts, one person guesses. Nobody has to perform alone, which is why it works at pre-drinks and normal charades does not.
• Assassin Everyone is secretly assigned another person, and has to get them to accept an object — a coaster, a specific coin, a satsuma. Take it and you are out, and your killer inherits your target. Ends with two people circling each other by the fridge.
• Story from an object Hand someone something random off a shelf. Sixty seconds to explain its tragic backstory. Pass it on. Consistently the funniest thing in the room.
• Most likely to Point on three. Keep it affectionate. It is pre-drinks, not a trial.

What to skip

• Anything with a rulebook. If explaining takes longer than a round, it belongs at a games night.
• Anything needing fixed teams. The room size changes four times. Teams that must stay balanced will not.
• Anything needing silence. You will not get silence, and asking three times is how a room turns on you.
• Long eliminations. Whoever goes out first now has forty minutes of standing about.
• Drinking games as the whole plan. They work, and then they are the only thing happening, and then everyone is done before you have left the house. Fine as one gear. Poor as the engine.

The bit nobody plans

The single most useful thing you can do is notice the dip — usually about forty minutes in, when the first wave has arrived and the second has not — and have one thing ready for it. Not a schedule. One thing.

And stop it early. The classic mistake is running a game past its natural end because it was going well. End it while people still want more, and it is the first thing they ask for next time.