![]() Pass-Out’s success led to more than a dozen other adult-oriented releases from Bresee, games with names like Sip & Strip and Sip-n-Go Naked, but his original concept remained his most successful. He also advertised in publications like Playboy (Bobbie, an actress, is a former Bunny), whose readership was pretty much the perfect target ( “The nationwild party-drinking game that’s stimulating spree-loving guys & gals everywhere”). By the late ‘60s, it had blown up, both on college campuses and with members of the American military, to whom Bresee marketed directly via hosting gigs on the Armed Forces Radio Network. But, as Bobbie Bresee, Frank’s wife of 42 years, puts it, “All you have to do is go around the board once and you’re drunk.” (Her preferred drink to play with, in the early days, was a Greyhound: vodka and grapefruit juice over ice.)īresee, who’s best known for his work as a radio host and historian, started off small, selling Pass-Out directly to retailers in his native Southern California. The object of Pass-Out is to collect ten of these cards before anyone else, which stretches out gameplay in a way that all but guarantees a hangover. Those verbal challenges- “Amos Ames the amiable astronaut aided in an aerial enterprise at the age of eighty-eight”-are doled out to players via “Pink Elephant” cards, a cheeky reference to the hallucinatory beasts synonymous with drunkenness (see, for reference, a bottle of Delirium Tremens beer). Depending on where you land, you could end up sipping your own cocktail, forcing competitors to sip theirs, smoking a cigarette (“LIGHT UP”), smooching another player (“Take one drink and kiss your partner, or take three drinks and kiss all partners”) or reciting a treacherous tongue twister out loud. Rolling a pair of dice, players work their way across a series of spaces, each of which features a different instruction. But no funny money ever exchanges hands here-the relevant currency, instead, is alcohol. ![]() In fact, there’s even a corner space called “The Bar” that functions more or less like Rich Uncle Pennybags’ jail. Moving pieces methodically around the perimeter of a square field of play, Pass-Out resembles Monopoly at first glance. And if you don’t, you’re not playing it right. ![]() From the Xs-for-eyes stick figure that serves as the game’s mascot to the mischievous, mildly lascivious instructions, Pass-Out is not exactly subtle about its intentions. ![]() Copyrighted in 1962 and sold around the world since then, Bresee’s appropriately named game is a relic of a bygone era of social lubrication-a more emancipated time when everyone drank, everyone smoked and no one was there to nanny-state the results. ![]()
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