A genius development in the world of drinking games or a sacrilegious alteration to a favorite drunken activity at colleges and dive bars across the country? We’ll leave it up to you to decide what you think of the new hexagonally-shaped plastic cups created by two mechanical engineers, but the new design certainly raises some intriguing questions. There have been attempts to create cleaner or better beer pong cups before, but these may be the cream of the crop. As Foodbeast tells it, these cups are tricked out with so many fancy features it will make your head spin like a ping pong ball rolling off someone’s fingers.
Not only does the Hexcup accomplish the most obvious feat of making re-racks easier, faster, and less of an annoyance, but the altered shape also makes them aerodynamic and crack-resistant. In theory, aerodynamic cups seem like an amazing feature to keep the cups from sliding around or off the table, but that’s all part of the fun of the game anyway. Some nights half the entertainment is just being able to shame the guy who keeps knocking cups over with his over-aggressive shots and terrible aim. Plus, with a non-circular edge these cups remove any possibility of the ball spinning around the rim without touching the liquid as if in a centrifuge and the players can’t blow or pull the ball out to save their hides from losing a cup.
To traditionalists, these rules add adrenaline-fueled moments to an average game of pong, those unexpected moments that elicit gasps and shrieks. However, for people trying to shake things up a bit more, the honeycomb shape can add new challenges to what has been a mostly unchanged drinking game. To each their own, but the beer pong champ in me would rather her friends not start introducing new ways to play the game that could have dire consequences to her win-loss record. Adapt or die has never rang so true (in a juvenile, purely fun way).
Although with a price tag of $15 a set, compared to $2 for dozens of normal red plastic cups, a set of Hexcups is a tall order for any broke Brooklynite or average frat house partiers. Any savvy college student can stretch that amount to at least three nights prowling campus bar specials (something tells us the re-washable and reusable aspect isn’t a selling point to the under-20 set). One of the only people we know who could both afford to stock up without regretting the purchase and would relish the opportunity to play with them is noted cool teen Malia Obama. Tell us how it goes, Malia. Maybe we’ll try them out ourselves after putting some money away from the next few paychecks.
(via FoodBeast)
