Everyone’s heard of drinking games; they’re old news, man. In this hiptastic new time, with dispensary lines around the corner and even squares lighting up, weed steps closer and closer to social acceptability with each passing year.
But that’s just the thing. The fact that alcohol is a social lubricant allows for a thousand ways to drink and hang. Like I said, everyone knows about beer pong and flip cup, but what are we to do when a gaggle of party-goers wants to smoke in a competitive fashion? Mr. Bud, author of 2014’s Mr. Bud’s Pot Smoking Games: 25 Fun Ways to Get Baked With Your Friends (Ulysses Press, 2014, $14.95), has the answer.
OK, so he’s no Leo Tolstoy. But Mr. Bud sure knows how to take Yahtzee to the next level. He’s got a sunny disposition rarely found in drunks (or Tolstoy), and that’s the first thing you’ll notice upon picking up the book. Dude has the same cadence as Jim Breuer in Half Baked, and it’s all in good fun. Whereas drinking games force the loser to drink (and drink and drink and drink), Mr. Bud’s games are all designed so that the winner gets rewarded with smoke (and smoke and smoke and smoke).
From rummy to Twister to hold ‘em to chess, the book covers all the classic games you played from childhood to adulthood, and reminds you repeatedly that they’re all way more awesome if you shmeek a beel at the halfway point.
All bases are covered, too; there’s a section of games where you literally just smoke weed, and that’s the whole point (hold it the longest and win!). Also, there’s a list of recommended movies, brownie recipes, board game pieces, instructions on how to make an apple pipe, a run down on how to shotgun and some brief anecdotes that bring Willie Nelson to mind.
So yes, perhaps marijuana lacks a certain je ne sais quoi found in cocktail lounges, but it’s books like this that bring the creative side of pot to the foreground, and that can’t be bad, right? Instead of that “amotivational syndrome” we’ve heard so much about?
Ah, who cares, let’s go play Battlespliffs again.