Ride the Bus, Drinking Game Rules

Category: Card Games · Players: 2-6 · You’ll need: 52-card deck; drinks

A three-phase card game. Phases 1 and 2 decide who has to "ride the bus", the punishing final phase.

Setup: One person is the dealer with a full shuffled deck. Aces count high.

Phase 1 – Four questions. The dealer asks each player these four questions, one at a time, dealing that player a face-up card after each answer. Keep your dealt cards in front of you.

1. "Red or black?" Guess the color of your card. Wrong = drink 1.
2. "Higher or lower?" Will your second card be higher or lower than your first? Wrong = drink 2. A tie counts as wrong.
3. "Inside or outside?" Your first two cards form a range (e.g. a 4 and a 10). Will your third card fall inside that range (5–9) or outside it (3 or lower, J or higher)? Wrong = drink 3. Matching either end counts as wrong.
4. "What suit?" Guess your fourth card's suit (hearts, diamonds, clubs, or spades). Wrong = drink 4.

Phase 2 – The pyramid. The dealer lays out a face-down pyramid: a row of 5 cards, then 4 on top of it, then 3, 2, and 1. The dealer flips the pyramid one card at a time, starting with the bottom row. If a flipped card matches the rank of a card in your hand (from Phase 1), you may lay that card on it and hand out drinks: 1 sip for bottom-row matches, 2 for the next row, up to 5 for the top. Whoever still holds the most cards when the pyramid is done rides the bus. (Tie? Highest leftover card rides.)

Phase 3 – Riding the bus. The dealer lays a fresh row of 6 face-down cards in front of the loser and flips them one at a time. Number cards (2–10) are safe. Any J, Q, K, or A means: drink (J=1, Q=2, K=3, A=4 sips), the dealer replaces all flipped cards with new ones, and you start again from card 1. You escape the bus only by getting through the whole row with no face cards or aces.

Ride the Bus, Variations

• Longer bus: The loser rides a 10-card bus instead of 6, or a pyramid-shaped bus (rows of 1-2-3-4) where each row's face card sends you back to the start of that row only.
• Mercy rule: Cap the bus at 3 restarts; after that the rider chugs once and is freed.
• Give-and-take pyramid: In Phase 2, alternate rows are “take” rows, matching cards mean you drink instead of giving.

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