Slap Cup Drinking Game Rules

Setup:

• Place 21 of the cups clustered in the middle of the table, with roughly even spacing. Make sure 1 cup is obviously the center.
• Fill the center cup with a full drink. This is the ‘death cup.’
• Fill the rest of the cups with 1/4 of a drink.
• Players stand evenly around the edge of the table.
• Designate two players that are opposite each other as the starters. These players get 1 empty cup each and 1 ping pong ball.
  

Slap Cup Rules:

• The aim of the game is to bounce the ball into your empty cup when it’s your turn. You can move the empty cup between attempts but you can’t touch it during a shot.

• When someone calls: “ready, set, go!” the two starters start trying to bounce their ping pong ball into their empty cup.

• If you score on your first attempt you can pass your cup (with the ball in it) to anyone else around the table.

• When you score on any attempt other than your first try you can only pass your cup to the person to your right.

• If the person directly to your right has a cup and is still trying to score their ball – you get to slap their cup off the table. Hence the name Slap Cup. After slapping their cup you must pass your empty cup and ball to the person two to your right.

• If your cup is slapped off the table, in accordance with the previous rule, you must drink a cup from the middle of the table. Once you’ve drank that drink you use your new cup to bounce the ball into. Be quick or you might get your cup slapped again.

• The full cup is saved for last. Try to avoid being the unfortunate person who gets their cup slapped at the end of the game!

• If you set up for a new game the players should shuffle around to avoid repeated matchups.

Sometimes one person ends up having to drink more than their share of the cups – know your limits. Please drink responsibly.

Basic Slap Cup Strategy:

If you sink your first shot you can pass the cup to anyone at the table – there are two basic strategies:

• Generally you want to pass it to the player directly to the left of the other person with a cup. This gives them the opportunity to score quickly and get to slap the other cup.

• If it’s near the end of the game it can be smart to pass it far away from you to try and avoid getting the center ‘death cup.’

Alternate Slap Cup Rules:

Some of the common variations to the rules are:

• Add more cups & more drinks if you have more players. Generally each person puts in a drink – so add 4 more cups to the middle.

• Play the Stack Cup drinking game rules – Everything is the same as slap cup except that instead of slapping the cup you stack your cup into the losers cup and push the stack to the next person. The person who just got their cup stacked has to grab a drink from the middle and keep playing like in slap cup. The point of stacking the cups is one person is trying to bounce their ball into a stack of cups that gets pretty tall as the game goes on.

• If you feel really ballsy (pun intended) arrange the cups in obvious rings and fill the cups more and more as you move from outside in – with the center cup being the most full.

Alternate names: Boom Drinking Game, Cluster Fuck Drinking Game, Stack Cup Drinking Game, Hex Drinking Game (if you neatly arrange the cups into a hex shape)

Have fun, and good luck!