How to Play: Hot Pile

This is a favorite drinking game of ours, and all you need are drinks and a deck of cards! To start, the dealer shuffles the deck and arranges 9 cards face up in a 3x3 square. It should look like this:

One player picks a face up card and guesses if the next cards will be HIGHER or LOWER than that card. For example, they might see the king in the bottom row and say, “Lower than the King.” Then the dealer flips a card on top of it.

If the guesser is correct, congrats! Everyone is spared and the next guesser goes. Maybe they’ll say “Higher than the Six.”

If the guesser is incorrect, everybody takes a drink. That pile is now BURNED, and must be flipped over. It can not be used for the rest of the game. After a few right/wrong guesses, your setup will look something like this:

The game is over when one of two things happens: Either you run out of piles and LOSE, or finish off the deck first and WIN!

Hot Pile is our favorite game because it’s high energy with low commitment: Folks can poke in and out at any point of the game, encouraging others to join into the infectious energy.

One last thing, it’s always possible the flipped card ends up being the SAME as the guesser’s picked card (instead of higher and lower). That counts as an incorrect guess as well and burns the pile (DRINK!) Of course, you can call SAME when guessing. It’s high risk, but if you’re right, you get to un-burn a pile!