I saw somewhere written that a stag do / hen do is a mockery of marriage to make it seem less threatening.  Indeed, marriage is a new and important step in one’s life. Is the step between teenagehood and adulthood, and it can be scary as when you’re young, you love freedom, independence, lack of worries, the power of starting all over again in case of failure. So, a mockery of this step can calm our nerves and treat our anxiety or fear of responsibilities. 

Stag dos are fun and this tradition became an actual industry ( I am earning my living from it after all). It all started back in the days, with a group of friends drinking on their friend’s behalf, to celebrate his passing to a new stage of life: marriage. 

Now, a bachelor party is more complexe. The groups are not just going to a pub to have some drinks, they are travelling for those drinks. Sometimes half a world, haha. Such a trip involves fun activities, restaurant bookings, modern and entertaining city tours, clubbing till sun comes up, strippers and strip clubs and most of all… lots of booze and drinking games. 

Heavy drinking is a must do, especially for the one getting married. Is like a task he has to accomplish, just like in fairy tales, when Prince Charming had to fight a dragon to win the princesses hand. Now Prince Charming is fighting bottles and who knows what imagination brings on after a few shots, haha.

To accomplish this task, drinking games are very much needed. They represent a more creative way to reach a “ must do” drunkenness level. Of course, as a student, I’ve been at a few student parties in the Uni’s Campus and I played Beer Pong or Never Have I Ever but stag do drinking games are on another level.

My first encounter with drinking games on a stag do was a few years ago when I was guiding a group of 16 men from their hotel to the Old City Centre which is the main spot with bars and pubs. We were on a big boulevard, walking and randomly chatting when suddenly, one of them shouted something. I don’t quite remember what he said, I just remember that I saw all of them down on the ground and everyone else on the boulevard looking at us in a very strange way. My first thought was that maybe they noticed something dangerous happening and they did this as a defence act. They were all nicely dressed up as we were supposed to go to a nice club after dinner and even I was wearing high heels and was dressed up. My shock was even bigger as I saw them all laughing at me and telling me that I will have to drink two shots of alcohol when we arrive at the first bar. It was a drinking game, where everybody had to go down on the floor when one was giving a certain signal and the last person standing was the one losing the game. I was that person that time so I gracefully and decently drank those shots like a loser I was. Since then, I said to myself that I shall be more careful and pay attention to these games. I lost a few more over the years, obviously. 

One game that I liked a lot was the toy soldier game: each member of the group has a toy soldier with a certain attack position. When someone randomly gives a signal, everybody has to take the pose of his toy soldier. Of course, at the first round I was too busy telling stories about Bucharest and missed the signal and again, I  gracefully drank my glass. 

Another game that I liked and this was very interesting because it somehow required foreign language skills. There were a couple of shot glasses. Each of them had a mixture of drinks with different ingredients that made them pretty disgusting. For example, vodka mixed with beer and a drop of chilli sauce, something like that. Then, there was a person from the group with a list of phrases in a foreing language, in this case, it was French. The game rules were like this: one was reading the phrase and the players tried to translate it. Who was closest to the correct translation was the winner so he had to assign a person from the group that had to drink two of the disgusting shots. I loved this game as I won many times until they realised I can also speak French so again, I had to gracefully drink a shot as I “ forgot” to mention my language skills at the beginning of the game and wasn’t very fair…Ooops!

In any case, the top of the top in the drinking games hierarchy, is the flipping coin one, heheee! Each participant should have a glass with their favourite drink. The idea is to have diverse drinks, one has beer, one has vodka, one has gin and so on. On the table, there is an empty glass and the game starts when the first player pours from his glass an amount of drink, then flips a coin and has to choose if it’s heads or tails. If he gets it right, he passes the glass to the next player, if not, he has to drink. But if he gets it right, the next player has to pour from his drink over the drink he poured. Therefore, imagine that at some point, someone has to drink a full glass of a mixture of drinks. Fun, ha?!

How creative can you be with the drinking games on a stag do? Can you come up with something new? Do you like the easy ones or the hard ones? Are you a heavy player or do you prefer an easy Beer Pong? You got the courage to play even though the rules are new to you?

 I played…so will you?