Most of what gets called a golf drinking game isn’t a game. It’s a rule. Hit it in the water, drink. Three-putt, drink. There’s no winner and nobody’s keeping score, and that’s completely fine, because that’s what your group actually wants on a Saturday.
This post is broken into two distinct sections. First, we have a custom drinking game builder where you pick what costs you a drink and what earns you the right to hand one out. Second, we have a growing list of truly dedicated drinking games to play on the golf course.
Start with the builder, watch the gauge work out how many beers you’ve just signed up for, then send the card to the group so everyone can start planning out who’s going to be their ride home.
Drink responsibly, and enjoy the best combo that life has to offer: golf and beer.
Build Your Own Drinking Game
Two steps. Pick your take triggers, which are the things that cost you a drink, then your give triggers, where doing something good lets you hand one out instead. Set every rule to a sip, a gulp or finish it.
The gauge measures how many standard 5.0% alcohol beer cans you’d consume across a typical round for an average golfer. We’ve calculated a can as fifteen sips or five gulps each, so it can tell you that eighteen tee-box sips is a little over one beer. It’ll swing from Sober to Hammered as you add rules.
Give your custom game a fun name, download the course-reference card, and send it to the crew.
If you’re in a hurry, the four preset buttons roll a fresh game every time you tap them, from a couple of beers to a genuinely stupid afternoon.
The Rules Menu
Every one of these works on its own, with any format, in any group size. Pick off the menu and crack a beer.
Bad shots
The classics, and the ones you have to be careful with. Almost all of them punish higher-handicap players first. Below are the triggers and their default drink amounts.
- Water ball — Gulp. The most satisfying one to enforce on somebody else.
- Lost ball — Gulp. Run it both ways though: find somebody’s abandoned Pro V1 in the trees and you get to hand a drink out instead.
- Miss the fairway — Sip. Fires on all fourteen driving holes, so this one adds up faster than anything else on the menu.
- Find a bunker — Sip. Or, flip it: get up and down from the sand in one, and you hand out a drink.
- Hit a tree — Sip. Same tree twice on one hole, two sips for you pal.
- Chunk it — Sip. Ball goes nowhere, you drink.
- Skull it — Sip. The low screamer across the green counts, too.
- Hit the cart path — Sip. And if the bounce is lucky, you might be drinking twice.
- Airmail the green — Sip. This one actually catches decent players, because you need a real swing to fly a green.
- Whiff it — Finish it. It’ll happen once a season, and it’s a deserved punishment.
- Shank one out of bounds — Finish it. Harsh, maybe? Deserved, probably.
On the green
The fairest section on the menu. Scratch players and 20-handicaps three-putt at closer to the same rate than they do anything else, so these land evenly.
- Three-putt — Sip. The one every single person in your group will owe at some point.
- Four-putt — Gulp, have a moment of silence, and then go work on some of our scratch-bound drills.
- Lip-out — Sip. Full horseshoe around the cup, and the whole group better be drinking with you.
- Miss inside three feet — Sip. Watch how fast the gimmes start getting conceded.
Off the scorecard
Easiest to track, hardest on your worst player. Run these off net scores or don’t run them at all if the handicaps in your group are miles apart.
- Every stroke over par — Sip. Bogey one, double two, and you can see where this is going.
- Double bogey or worse — Gulp. Setting the floor at double instead of bogey is what makes the round survivable, since bogey is most people’s ordinary hole.
- Worst score on the hole — Sip. Take five seconds to explain why you suck so bad and then move on.
Tee box and pace
These are just fun ones to toss in that are less golf-related and more beer-focused.
- Before every tee shot — Sip. Paces itself, needs zero tracking, and it’s usually the last rule left standing.
- Put your drink down (other than when you’re swinging) — Finish it.
- While the tee shot is in the air — 2 sips. This is a bonding moment.
Odds and ends
Nothing here tracks your golf, which makes them the safest picks in a mixed group.
- Make the group yell FORE! — Sip. If somebody had to shout, drink up.
- Hit a house — Gulp. Rare, expensive, and absolutely worth a penalty.
- Leave a club on the green — Sip. The wedge you walked away finally gets its revenge.
- Give unsolicited swing advice — Sip. Nobody asked. Drink up, pal.
- Phone goes off during a swing — Sip and then silence that thing.
- Blame the equipment out loud — Sip. It was never the clubs.
The Give Menu
Same idea, other direction. Do the thing and somebody else drinks. Pair a couple of these with your take rules and the round stops being a tax on your worst player.
Scoring
Do something good on the card and the drink goes to somebody else.
- Make a birdie — Gulp, everyone else drinks. More rare, but fun.
- Make an eagle — Finish it, everyone else drinks. Almost nobody will trigger this, which is what makes it worth keeping.
- Make a par — Sip to your choice. Fires often, so keep it to a sip unless you want a heavy round.
- Par or better — Sip to your choice. The easier version. Don’t double this one up with those above.
- Win the hole outright — Sip, everyone else drinks. Beat all three of them and the rest of the group pays.
- Hole in one — Everyone finishes their drink, and you are buying at the 19th hole, which is not negotiable.
Good shots
One shot, not a whole hole. These are the ones worth showing off about.
- Up and down from sand — Gulp to your choice. Out of the bunker and in the hole in two. Genuinely hard.
- Chip in — Gulp, everyone else drinks. From off the green, straight in. Celebrate loudly.
- One-putt — Sip to your choice. Common enough that a sip is plenty.
- Closest to the pin — Sip to your choice. Settle it on the par 3s and let the winner hand one out.
- Longest drive (in fairway) — Sip to your choice. The fairway condition is what stops it being a pure bomber contest.
- Green in regulation — Sip to your choice. Rewards the part of the game most games ignore.
Odds and ends
Nothing here tracks your golf, which makes them the safest picks in a mixed group.
- Find someone else’s ball for them — Sip to the person whose ball you found. Spotting somebody else’s ball in the tall grass finally earns you something.
- Find a Pro V1 — Gulp to your choice. A ball nobody found and everybody wants.
- Hit the flagstick — Sip to your choice. On the fly or on the roll, it still counts.
- Get a lucky bounce — Sip to your choice. Off a tree, off the path, off a cart. Take the win.
- Save par after a penalty stroke — Gulp to your choice. A dropped ball and still a par is the best feeling in golf.
The Ones That Are Actually Games
These have a structure, a scorecard, and somebody wins. If you want the round to have a shape rather than just a running tab, start here.
Wolf, played for drinks
The best structure on this page for a foursome, and it’s a real betting game with the money swapped out. Tee order rotates so everyone takes a turn as the Wolf. The Wolf watches each tee shot and has to call a partner right then, on the spot, before the next guy hits. Pass on all three and you’re playing alone against the other three for double.
Losing side drinks. What makes it work is that the teams change every hole, so nobody’s stuck on the wrong end of the same match for four hours. Play it net. Full Wolf rules and scoring →
Beer Tax
Our own take on the stroke-over-par rule, built to fix the thing that breaks it. Strokes come off first, there’s a cap per hole, and the tab gets settled at the turn instead of hanging over the whole round.
If your group has tried the plain version and it flattened somebody, this is the one to run instead. Full Beer Tax rules →
F the Golfer
Another Golf Games Hub original, and the most straightforwardly fun one we’ve built. One golfer is the target each hole and the rest of the group is playing against them. Then it rotates.
Because the target moves on a fixed schedule, the pressure never parks on whoever’s playing worst. Everybody gets their turn in the barrel. Full F the Golfer rules →
Bingo Bango Bongo
Three points every hole. First ball on the green, closest to the pin once everybody’s on, first in the cup. For each point that you win, give out a sip. If you finish a hole without picking up a point, you sip. Or, if your tolerance is up, make each of these a chug.
It was designed to give weaker players a way to score, since first-on-the-green rewards whoever is furthest out rather than whoever hits it best. That makes it one of the few things here that’s genuinely fair straight out of the box. Full Bingo Bango Bongo rules →
Beer Handicap
Drinks buy strokes. Finish a beer, knock a shot off your score, three or four maximum for the round. Everyone plays their own ball and low net wins.
It’s the only thing on this page where the better player has more reason to drink than the worse one. A scratch player chasing 71 will trade a beer for a shot in a heartbeat. The guy shooting 96 needs about eight of them, and he knows it.
Sort This Out Before the First Tee
Most courses ban outside alcohol. It’s a liquor license condition, not snobbery, and getting caught usually means being asked to leave without a refund. Buy from the cart or call ahead and ask.
Plan the drive home in advance. Plenty of states will hand you a DUI for operating a golf cart, and plenty more will get you in the parking lot if you get too rowdy. Work out who’s staying dry, or how everybody’s getting back, before anyone takes a sip.
FROM A PRO
Four beers is the ceiling if you still want to play well. Sipping slowly helps, but most people’s game starts to slide after one beer. So, focus on the fun you’re having, not the scorecard.
A round is four hours plus, which is long enough for the drinks to get away from you. Golf.com asked a tour pro how much beer you should actually drink on the course and the answer is less than most groups assume. Alternate with water. Golf Digest’s on-course hydration breakdown is worth two minutes if you’re playing in heat.
Every rule here works fine with a soft drink for anyone sitting out. And keep an eye on pace, because slow play is what actually what draws the first attention. The rest of the unwritten stuff is in our guide to golf etiquette.
Start With a Few
Never done this before? Three rules is plenty. Take three-putt, water ball, and the birdie give. One lives on the green, one lives off the tee, and the third only fires when somebody plays well, so the drinking doesn’t just punish whoever is having a rough day.
Once you have seen how your group handles it, add a few more.
One last thing, and it matters more than any rule on this page. Sips, not shots. Alternate with water, eat something at the turn, and know that a round is four hours or more, which is long enough for the drink count to sneak up on you.
And nobody drives home. Sort out an Uber or a designated driver in advance, because plenty of states will hand you a DUI for operating a golf cart, and plenty more will get you in the parking lot if you get too out of hand. And most importantly, we don’t want you or anyone else getting hurt.
Otherwise, have a good one out there.
