Ages ago, when I was in junior high, my best friend received a copy of

as a birthday present. One surprising thing was that the girl who gave it to her was the most straightlaced of us all (and no, it wasn't me. I probably gave her something to do with dragons). The second was how thoroughly we had no idea that it was inappropriate. Even now, searching for that image, I was surprised to find it on the same page as several erotic games.

It just didn't seem that bad, despite the fact that the whole point of the game is to make your way through a house, drinking up a storm as you go, trying not to break too many things or make too much of a drunken fool of yourself, to, as they say, call God on the big porcelain phone.

That is what we called it in 7th grade, anyway.

It was actually a fairly amusing game. How dour would you have to be not to laugh when faced with spaces such as "Smashed priceless antique lamp. Go back three spaces." and cards like "Take a drink, put a lampshade on your head, and do a party dance." We played it pretty regularly, actually, and we made ourselves as sick (if not sicker) than those people who played it as it was meant to be played (you know, with the alky-hol), because we were playing it with soft drinks...copious amounts of them, until we had drunk all the decent brand cokes in the house and were down to diet orange-ish K-mart sodas.

The crowning moment of glory for this game was when we smuggled it to a birthday party for another friend of ours. His mother was the most controlling parent I have ever come across. It was a surprise party, and she had planned our arrivals and where we would stand with drill-sergeant precision, the final straw being when she gave us each approximately three pieces of confetti and warned us to throw them up in the air when friend entered, not at him, so as not to get any in his eyes.

Unfortunately, we did not get to play it for long, because she soon figured out what we were doing (I guess the whoops of laughter gave it away) and she cut off our drink supply. Then took the game away and yet refused to give us any more soda for fear we would start playing again from memory or something.

Another game that I always very much wanted to play yet never did was Ade Edmonson's How to Be a Complete Bastard, the original board game version. They had a copy of it on the back shelf of an English bar I used to drink at, but no matter how much we teased, the bartenders never let us play it. One said that he was protecting us, because it was a really stupid game. The owner just said no, over and over, until we were driven to snap, "Well, guess you don't need any practice playing it, do you."

On the plus side, we did once sneak down their decorative giant can of mustard, pry its lid open without anyone noticing, and turn it into an impromptu time capsule celebrating that night of drinking by hiding in it: three cigarettes, a handful of loose change, several napkins, a beer glass, that day's newspaper, and a bottle opener.

Such a 'secret' was too good to keep, so by the next week we had become bored with the game and decided to hold a huge excavation ceremony.

"Hey," commented one of the bartenders, impassively picking the bottle opener out of the pile. "I was looking for that."

Good times.