Playing drinking games is a unique way of adding fun to the drinking by Chinese. The drinking games have been existed for a long time, which might be originally invented for keeping the order of a feast, or for punishing those who failed to obey the rule of bottom-up. In a word, drinking games are set up for punishing the losers. However, its major purpose is to juice up the gathering, which may be made of guests unknown to each other. On that occasion, drinking games can be activator that wakes up the whole table. 

Drinking games can be played in various ways among men of letters or ordinary people, in different manners of course. The literati often play poems or couplets game, or riddle-guessing game, while the ordinary people like to play simpler drinking games requiring no prior preparations.