Beer Trek

It’s no secret that I used to be a Star Trek fan. From the time I was a kid in the early 1970s, I watched the original series most afternoons after school. Once it hit its stride in season two or three, I thoroughly enjoyed The Next Generation, too. Nut I stopped there and never really watched the series that followed afterward, at least not beyond a few disappointing episodes of DS9. So overall, despite having owned a stuffed Tribble as a 10-year old, I was more of a Trekker than Trekkie, a small but important distinction in the world of fandom. So when I stumbled on this website earlier today, it made me want to dust off my old VHS copies of Star Trek. The only thing that prevented that was the fact that I got rid of them several years ago because I hadn’t watched them in many, many years.

Beer Trek is, of course, a drinking game. It’s hosted by Planet of the Geeks and bills itself as “The Greatest Star Trek Drinking Game in the Universe!” And while such boasting may be hard to prove, I certainly don’t know of a better one. It’s a standard enough take on the TV/movie watching type of drinking game, where everybody drinks whenever a certain action takes place on screen or whenever a character says a particular phrase. But with Beer Trek there appear to something on the order of 350 or more separate rules, not including footnoted rules and advanced rules, which even include meta-rules. Plus, the rules can be filtered for rules that are only good for the original series or one of the newer ones. It looks like the game has been up on the web for over ten years, but I never came across it until today. If you need a reason to drink while watching Star Trek, and lord knows it can’t hurt, this may be the perfect vehicle to make it through another viewing.