The need to study Kimble drinking game rises from the research material but also from Olli Sotamaa and Jaakko Stenros’ article “Through a Shot Glass, Darkly: The Study of Games in the Light of Drinking Games” published in Games and Culture in 2016. In their article they address a question whether drinking games are just one way to instrumentalize games or the gamification of drinking. Gamification has been defined as “the use of game design elements in non-game context” (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). Katriina Heljakka (2015), on the other hand, has argued that the concept of gamification has been expanding, and that it can involve different kinds of products, apps, services, and even the uses of toys. I will use Sotamaa and Stenros’ article as a guideline throughout the paper. I attempt to concentrate on the positive sides of Kimble drinking game versions and describe some distinctive features of these versions. The paper proceeds from a short overview of Sotamaa and Stenros’ article to the use of Kimble as a drinking game. I will make some remarks on how Kimble actually verifies Sotamaa and Stenros’ results. Lastly, I will attempt to move further by suggesting that we might need to look drinking games (and other uses of board games) as one biography (Kopytoff 1986) of board games, and as something that increases the game’s replayability.
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