Cinco De Mayo Drinking Games 2016: 5 Party Ideas For Adults Celebrating The Mexican Holiday

Cinco de Mayo is Thursday, and that means it’s time for a fiesta. While the day is only a minor holiday in Mexico, it has become a widely celebrated excuse to have a good time, particularly among those in the United States.

The holiday began as a Mexican festival commemorating the country’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. Though France continued fighting Mexico for six more years, the Battle of Puebla provided an important symbolic victory and helped bolster the resistance movement.

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is mostly observed in the state of Puebla, and revelry is limited to military parades, re-enactments of the battle and other similar events. However, Cinco de Mayo in the United States has become a celebration of Mexican heritage and culture.

Parties and festivals in the U.S. are especially popular in cities with large Mexican-American populations, but many people also take the day as an opportunity to eat traditional Mexican foods, appreciate Mexican music and generally enjoy themselves.

Whatever your plans are for Cinco de Mayo, they are likely to involve alcohol. Here are five fun drinking games you can use to keep the party going.

1. Quarters: This game is best for groups of three to six people. All you need is a table, cups and one quarter. Before you begin, fill each glass with your favorite beer — perhaps a Corona, Dos Equis or another Mexican cerveza.

Each person takes a turn bouncing the quarter off the table and trying to get it into one of the glasses. If someone makes the shot, they get to decide which friend chugs the beer. If the quarter misses the cups, the next person takes a turn.

2. Beer Pong: The classic college drinking game requires some physical prowess and a willingness to trash-talk your friends. To set up your playing area, arrange 10 cups in a pyramid-like form on each side of a long table and fill each cup with your chosen amount of beer.

The game is generally played by teams of two, and each team takes a turn throwing a ping-pong ball into the other team’s cups. If a ball lands in a cup, the opponents drink the contents and then take the cup away. The team that successfully eliminates all their opponents’ cups wins. You can find more details on beer pong rules and game play on the official beer pong website.

3. Drunk Jenga: If you’re looking for a grown-up version of a favorite child’s game, this one is for you. To play, you’ll need a Jenga set. Start by going around the table with each person pulling blocks. Every time someone successfully removes a block from the tower, he or she gets to make someone else drink.

And if you topple the whole Jenga tower? Drink a whole beer!

4. Questions: Another throwback to middle school, this game is like Truth or Dare. Each person takes turns being the questioner, and when it’s your turn, you ask another player to answer a yes or no question without hesitation. The answerer then becomes the next questioner.

There are plenty of rules to keep you drinking in this game: no laughing or repeating questions allowed, and if you break those rules you take a drink.

5. True American: This game debuted on the TV show “New Girl” and is a bit complicated to play but can be a lot of fun. In the episode where it originated, the title character, Jess, described the game as “50 percent drinking game, 50 percent life-size Candy Land.”

Her friends Schmidt and Winston chimed in with their own ideas. “Well, it’s more like 75 drinking, 20 Candy Land, and by the way the floor is molten lava,” Schmidt said. Winston clarified, “It’s actually 90 percent drinking and then it’s got a loose Candy Land-like structure to it.”

So with that helpful description, you may want to look up the rules. The website True American Rules has the rules as outlined on the sitcom as well as a similar but slightly tweaked set of rules that works better for playing in real life. If you’re looking to have an adventurous Cinco de Mayo, this game will provide plenty of fun. And people have even invented a Cinco de Mayo-themed version of the game for your playing pleasure.