Bar Crawl Roulette

Bar Crawl Roulette is a game best played with friends and your choice of drink. Get dropped in a city and it’s up to you to find the closest bar using Google Street View… and also finish that drink.

The idea came to me in two parts. Firstly I’ve been travelling the USA from New York to Santa Monica Pier using Google Street View (more on that another time). Then one day I was shopping in Tesco, and in the world beers aisle it came to me. What if instead of going from one city to another, there was a game where you had to find the closest bar?

Originally it was going to be themed around random cities in the world, but whilst building it, it became very apparent that finding a bar in Japan is much harder than finding one in London. I mean, do you know the word for bar in Japanese? I do, it’s バー (bā). So it’s weighted towards English speaking cities with a sprinkling of RNG to make things interesting.

The core principle stood firm though. Get dropped somewhere and find a bar. Even during early iterations of the game I saw its potential, and after some more iterations I had the grounds for a playable game.

I then wanted to see how friends would perceive this new idea. So I went back to the world beers aisle and found beers from the UK and further afield, then made a custom game where all players had the same city and we all drank the same beer that was made in that city. It was 12 rounds in total and it proved to be a hit. With each city we got more invested and the rivalry came to a head in the last few rounds, with a final decider match crowning the winner.

I’ve played this with friends a number of times now and every time it’s been a hit. A practice round helps if you’ve never used Street View, but surprisingly it’s been easily picked up. I hope you have as much fun playing as I’ve had building and “testing” this.