Build and hold onto an upright swinging tower of cups and balls. As the game progresses, this tower will become increasingly unwieldy, swinging unpredictably. You’ll have to use a steady hand to keep control of the tower. Tilt that cup! Catch the bouncing ping pong balls to win.
This games uses elements of games like Moving On Up and Bouncer. You can play it as a solitaire challenge, as a competitive race, or in teams.
You will need
- 8 plastic cups per player
- 8 ping pong balls per player
Set up
For each player:
- Put all cups together, one inside another, to create a compressed stack.
- The player takes hold of the stack of cups from the bottom.
- Put the 8 ping pong balls within easy reach.
Rules
Players create a tower of cups and balls by the following process:
- They first bounce a ping pong ball on the ground, then catch that ping pong ball in their stack of cups.
- When the ball is caught — the top cup in a stack now has a ping pong ball in it — the player takes the cup from the bottom of the stack and places it at the top. The new top cup is now sitting on a ping pong ball and has some freedom to move around.
- Repeat this process. Bounce another ping pong ball and catch it in the top cup of the stack. Then move the bottom cup the top, adding to an increasingly wobbly tower of alternating cups and ping pong balls.
Once a player has caught all ping pong balls, creating a tower where every cup is separated by a ping pong ball, with one final ping pong ball in the top cup, they have finished!
This is a great game for challenging your coordination. You not only have to bound the ball with one hand and catch it using the cups in the other, but the top cup will get increasingly further away from the hand that it trying to keep it under control. If you move the tower of cups around too quickly, or hold it at the wrong angle, it might fall apart completely, forcing you to start again.
Variants
To play this as a race, simply give every player a stack and their own ping pong balls. The first player to finish the challenge wins!
The team variant has one player taking control of the stack of cups and another starting with all the ping pong balls. The player with the balls will be standing several feet away and throwing the balls to the player holding the cups. All other rules are the same.