Drinking Games are a great way to spruce up a party and get people interacting with one another. Almost any activity can be made into a drinking game, from playing darts to flipping a cigarette pack and observing the way it lands.
The basic concept behind a drinking game of any kind is that when some event occurs, you consume some quantity of alcohol. While drinking games can be played with any units of comestibles, it does defeat the core purpose, which is to get pissed, smashed, drunk, or otherwise non-sober.
The most popular types of drinking game include Card games, like Asshole, games played by bouncing coins off of tables, like Quarters, dice games like Three Man, games which test your endurance like Century Club, and even games played while watching various television shows and movies. Some of the most famous examples of that latter genre include games for the various Star Wars and Star Trek movies.
While what makes something good is largely a matter of opinion, there are a few things that can certainly help a drinking game along. First of all, everyone in the game should be kept busy. You should never have to wait too long before you can take some kind of action, and optimally there should be opportunities for you to drink at any time. There should be interaction between players, with plenty of opportunity for people to form and fulfill grudges. And finally, the game should become gradually more difficult as you imbibe more alcohol, so that near the end it becomes a downward spiral of sorts. That, however, is true of nearly any drinking game.
In order to keep things lively, many games both give penalty drinks, and allow you to assign drinks to others. This brings an additional sense of community to the proceedings. Some games (like Fuzzy Duck) include tongue twisters which become more humorous as people have more and more difficulty repeating them, and remembering them.
Drinking games should also come with some words of warning. It is very easy to imbibe a great deal of alcohol in a relatively short period of time while playing these games. In fact, many of them are designed to get as much alcohol into you as possible before your body revolts. As such, even more care should be taken while playing drinking games than you should normally take while simply drinking.