Let’s be honest, while cornhole can be quite competitive, cornhole is largely a drinking game in itself. There’s nothing like having a cold one on a hot summer day and tossing a few bags while someone from your crew gets the grill going. But there are actual drinking games that you can play with cornhole. So here are some cornhole drinking games you should play.
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Get ready for the games
First make sure you know who to set up your cornhole court (read how here) and that you have legit cornhole bags (read about those here). Once you’ve got those, you’re ready to step up your cornhole drinking games.
Note that the image below is for a regulation-sized cornhole court and that if you’re simply playing in the backyard or while tailgating you don’t need the full distance between platforms. Check out my article on the right distance between cornhole boards for more.
Know how to keep score in cornhole
You should know how to score cornhole to get the most out of these drinking games. As a reminder, you typically score your game as follows:
- Cornhole — bags goes through the hole = 3 points
- Woody — bag lands on the wooden platform = 1 point
- Foul — not a woody or cornhole (bag hits the ground before hitting the board) = 0 points
Many people use the score cancellation scoring method to keep score. So if Team A earns 8 points and Team B earns 3 points in a frame, the Team A earns a total of 5 points and you move on to the next frame. Whoever scored in that frame will be the first person to go in the next frame.
- You can read more about how to keep score in cornhole here.
A drink per cornhole
This is the most basic way to play a drinking game with cornhole.
You play the standard cornhole rules but the only difference is that the other team takes a drink whenever your team sinks a cornhole and vice versa.
This is for those times when you just want to keep it simple or slowly work your way up to something much more intensive. It’s a good starter game.
A drink per point
If you want to ramp it up you can force the person to take drinks for every point that is scored.
So in the prior game, you’d simply take one drink for every bag the other team sends through the cornhole but in this game the other team has to take a drink for every point that you score.
Foul chugs
One way that is fun to play is to force the player or team to chug their drinks when they hit a certain number of fouls. You can play this along with the second game to make it that much of more of a sh*t show.
This is especially fun to play when things are already getting kind of sloppy because this could catch up to you quickly if you’re not very good at cornhole.
It’s also fun because it creates anticipation as you get closer to those five fouls or wherever you set the limit.
When they should chug depends on where you set the foul limit. Again, this is highly dependent on the skill level of the players. For an average frame you might set the chug at four or five fouls (or bags that don’t land on the cornhole board). This could be too low if the players are very inexperienced so maybe just play a couple of games first and see how many fouls each player commits.
Foul chugs (reverse)
Another fun way to do foul chugs is to set a level of fouls that will force you to drink if the opposing team stays under that number.
So instead of being forced to chug when you hit X amount of fouls, you have to chug when your opponent stays under X amount of fouls. This number will probably be lower like two or three depending on skill level. This way is fun because it’s completely out of your control whether you drink or not but if you’re playing against some sharp shooters be sure to keep the number low.
Lefty, righty
This is more of a feature you can throw into your game. You need to have non-ambidextrous players for this work best. Basically, during each game, one player can attempt to cornhole when throwing with their non-dominant hand.
If they cornhole on their first try then they can force someone to drink or chug, depending on how civil you want to keep it.
If they miss it though, a player from the other team gets to try it with his or her non-dominant hand. And if this person hits the cornhole, both players from the opposing team have to drink or chug so there’s potential for backfiring.
You can change up who drinks what and how much but you get the gist of it.
I drink, You Drink, We Drink
So this involved getting a custom cornhole board with designated holes. Typically, you’ll see three rows of two or three circles which each have a label which states: I drink, you drink, we drink. You can see an example of this board here.
People tend to make up their own rules for this game.
One common way to play it is that each player gets four bags and whichever hole the bags land in, that’s what action you have to take or choose. So if you toss a bag in a “you drink” circle, then the opposing player must drink. It’s pretty straight forward.
You can change things by making people drink if they foul and can also assign certain point levels for the different circles — there’s a lot of room for creativity (and of course drinking).
Final word on cornhole drinking games
Playing cornhole is usually a drinking game by itself but these games can really turn cornhole into something more like beer pong. It’s best to ease your way into one of the more mild games and then work your way up into the other games.
Photo by Simonne McClinton