What we cut, and why
The old version of this page led with three: a race to see who could get through a gram fastest, one hit a minute for sixty minutes, and a breath-holding contest passed around a circle. None of those is a game. They are competitions in consuming as much as possible as fast as possible, and one of them is a breath-holding challenge, which is a bad idea in any context.
If the way to win is to get through more than everyone else, it is not a game. It is a race with a name on it.
What makes a good one
The smoking is a punctuation mark rather than the score. Everybody can keep playing at their own pace, nobody is behind for going slowly, and the funny part is what people say rather than what they managed to inhale. All five below pass that test.
Categories
Agree a category — famous stoners, breakfast cereals, anything. Name one, then the next person names one starting with the last letter of yours. Miss, and you are out of the round rather than penalised with more. It is harder than it sounds and it gets much harder as the evening goes on, which is the joke.
Film swap
Someone puts on a film nobody in the room has seen. Whenever anything happens that a character should obviously have foreseen, whoever calls it first gets to narrate the next two minutes in that character’s voice. It collapses quickly and that is the point.
The wrong lyric
Play a song everyone half knows. First person to sing a confidently wrong lyric out loud wins the round; everyone else has to agree it was sung with total conviction. Conviction is the whole scoring system and it is impossible to fake badly.
Two truths, badly
The usual game with one change: all three statements have to be about the people in the room rather than about yourself. It goes from a party icebreaker to something much funnier and occasionally into territory that needs a change of subject, which is also part of it.
Describe it worse
Pick a film, a book or an object and describe it in the flattest possible terms until somebody guesses. A wizard school with a bureaucracy problem. A rectangle that shows you other rectangles. The worse the description, the better the round.
The alphabet story
Someone starts a story with a sentence beginning with A, the next person continues with B, and round you go. It falls apart somewhere around Q every single time, and the collective effort to rescue it is the best part. No scoring, no elimination, and people can drop in and out.
Guess the search
One person describes something they genuinely looked up recently without naming it, and everyone else has to reconstruct the search. It is funnier than it deserves to be, largely because of what people are willing to admit to having searched.
The host has one job
Make sure everybody has somewhere to sleep or a way home that is not driving, and decide that before anybody starts rather than at midnight. The old version of this post said the same thing and it is the one piece of it worth keeping verbatim.
Rank the nonsense
Name a category with no correct answer — sandwiches, bridges, sounds — and everyone has to produce a definitive top three and defend it. The defending is the game. It runs as long as people are enjoying it and stops dead the moment they are not, which is a useful property at the end of an evening.
The one-word film review
Go round the room reviewing films in exactly one word, and the round ends when somebody uses two. It sounds thin written down and it reliably outlasts the games with rules. Most of the good ones here are like that: the constraint does the work.
Pace, and the newcomer
Someone in the room will be far less practised than everyone else, and in a circle the pressure to keep up is invisible but real. Games where you can pass without losing solve this by design, which is most of why the five above are the ones on this page.
Edibles do not belong in a game
Worth saying plainly. Anything swallowed arrives late and all at once, so a game with a pace to it cannot account for them. If edibles are in the room, they are separate from whatever is being played, and they should be labelled.
Where to start
Categories, because it needs nothing and it works with any number of people. Everything else on this page is an escalation from there.
Questions people ask
What are some good games to play while smoking?
Ones where the game is the point and the smoking is punctuation: word games like Categories, describing a film in deliberately flat terms until somebody guesses, or a confidently wrong lyric contest. The test is whether someone can play at their own pace without falling behind. If the way to win is getting through more than everybody else, it is a race rather than a game.
Why not play smoking races or endurance games?
Because the scoring is the problem. A race to get through a gram, or a hit a minute for an hour, makes consuming as much as possible as fast as possible the object, and a breath-holding contest is a bad idea in any setting. We took all three out of this post. Nothing is lost: the games that are actually funny are funny because of what people say.
How do you host one of these safely?
Settle where everyone is sleeping, or how they are getting home without driving, before anything starts rather than at midnight. Pick games people can sit out of without losing, because the least practised person in a circle feels pressure that nobody says out loud. And keep edibles out of anything with a pace, since they arrive late and all at once.
