7 Fun FLIP CUP Variations People Are Playing At Parties

If you love drinking beer in massive quantities but have poor aim, your go-to game should be Flip Cup, if it isn’t already. Not to mention, the game is pretty simple and requires very little coordination, so your performance can remain high despite your steadily increasing BAC. But with all games that are a little redundant, they can get kind of boring. Here are some variations on the traditional Flip Cup that’ll keep your party poppin’.

1. T-Rex Arms

You know the T-Rex. As King of the Dinosaurs, they were extremely powerful and widely feared. In retrospect, this seems kind of strange because they had pretty short arms compared to the proportions of their body, which contributed to extremely poor coordination. The T-Rex pretty much walked around like he owned the place, but basically just thrashed its tail awkwardly and recklessly in an assertion of power. This variation on Flip Cup requires you to embody the dinosaur.

The game is played as normal, except you must flip your cup as a Tyrannosaurus Rex would – with extremely short arms and poor motor skills. Retract your arms from your t-shirt sleeves so that only your hand is showing through the arm hole. When done properly, your elbows will be pressed against your torso, and you will only have your hand for movement, rather than your entire arm. Once you get it right, you’ll want to roar in frustration like a T-Rex while attempting to flip your cup.

2. Dance Moves

Remember when you went to birthday parties as a kid and were blindfolded, spun around in circles until you almost vomited, and were then allowed to aimlessly approach a pinata with a baseball bat? This variation of Flip Cup draws from this tradition, minus the aggression and free candy.

When it’s your turn to flip the cup, chug your beer, and then spin around in a circle as fast as you can before you flip. If you miss, you’re out of luck, because you must spin again before attempting to flip for the second time. Try not to barf.

3. Survivor

If you got stuck with a shitty flip cup team, Survivor is a great, objective way to keep playing and drinking, but in a way that everyone has an equal chance at winning. Recruit an innocent bystander to drop a cup on the table. Once the cup makes contact, chug your beer and flip your cup as fast as you can. Once you have successfully flipped, raise your hands up in the air to signify you’re done. Whoever is slowest to flip and raise their hands is ejected from the game.

After the first round, you can dismiss your kind, cup-dropping bystander, because from then on, the loser of that round is the person who drops the cup for the next round. Play until a winner has been identified. If things get close and two people flip their cup successfully at the same time, make them do a Flip-Off to decide the winner. When doing a Flip-Off, each person drinks and flips two cups instead of one.

4. Team Survivor

Team Survivor is basically a combination Survivor and regular Flip Cup. This game requires two teams, just like the original rendition. Conduct the game as a normal flip cup game, with each person only picking up their cup when the person before them has flipped and landed. The losing team, however, must eject one player from the game.

Ideally, you want to eliminate your weakest link, so boot off that dude who took five tries to flip or the person who was to drunk to realize when it was their turn to go. But even when you kick a person off, their cup must remain. There must be the same number of cups on in play at all times. That means once a person is booted off, someone has to drink double. That also means that towards the end of the game, one person might have to drink and flip seven cups in a row. Fun, right?

5. Bob the Builder

Grab your hard hats, folks, because this game of Bob the Builder requires drunk people to try building something. Yikes. Everything about this game is the same as regular flip cup (drink and flip), but after you flip your cup, you have to build one big pyramid along with your teammates. If you’re playing in a big group with ten people per team, this can get really challenging.

Whichever team that finishes drinking, flipping, and building their pyramid wins. On the downside, if your pyramid collapses, you have to keep going as a team until it’s rebuilt. Have your beer pitcher handy in case your team sucks and you have to go three rounds each before succeeding.

6. Flip Cup Extreme

If you’ve reached a point in your debauchery where you’re full of drunken bravado, this game is for you. Again, it’s pretty similar to normal flip cup, but instead of starting with the cup right side up and flipping it onto the brim, you do the opposite. Drink your beer, start with the cup brim side down, and then flip it so it’s right-side-up. This doesn’t sound very hard, but think about how much less surface area of landing room you have on the table.

7. No Hands

No Hands is probably the messiest and most fun way to play flip cup, mainly because it’s entertaining watching everyone struggle. Like the name suggests, using your hands is completely out of the picture. When it’s your turn to drink, grab your cup with your teeth and tilt it back slowly so the beer goes in your mouth. It’s considered cheating if you do this but just spill your entire cup down your body. Once you have graciously tipped back your beer, place the cup on the table, and either continue to use your teeth or employ a suction technique to manipulate your cup onto its other side.

May the flips be ever in your favor.