How to Play Drink Exchange: Rules & Free Online Game

Object of the game

At the Drink Exchange, beer, wine, cocktails, shots and soda have prices like shares – and they change every round. You buy drinks while they’re cheap and sell them once they’ve got dear. Nobody drinks anything: it’s all about trading.

A game is one night of eight rounds, from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. Whoever is worth the most at closing time – coins plus stock at the final prices – wins.

What you need

Five drinks, each with a price: beer, wine, cocktails, shots and soda. Each starts at 10 coins, and a price is always between 0 and 20. Add three exchange dice and a board for the evening’s events – there are 14, and 8 of them come up each night. Every player starts with 100 coins and no stock.

At Tavern Jack it’s all digital: the glasses show the prices – the fuller, the dearer – along with a small chart of the night’s prices. Dice and sums are handled on the server. The table always shows every player’s current worth.

A round: everyone orders at once, in secret

Each round is one hour: 8, 9, 10 and 11 p.m., then midnight, 1, 2 and 3 a.m. At the start of the round the board shows its event, such as “Football on TV: Beer +3”. So everyone knows what will happen after trading.

Then everyone places one order at the same time, in secret: for each drink you choose how many to buy or sell. One order can cover several drinks – you can sell wine and use the money to buy beer, for example. You can also sit the round out.

• You can only sell what you have. There’s no short selling.
• Your order has to be affordable at the current price. Sales in the same order count towards your money.
• Nobody sees the other orders until prices are set – only who has already ordered. After the round, everyone sees who bought and sold what.

Setting prices, step 1: demand

Once everyone has ordered, prices are set – always in the same order: first demand, then the event, then the exchange dice.

For each drink, add up how many units all players are buying and subtract how many they’re selling. Divide the difference by twice the number of players and round: that’s how many steps the price moves up or down – three at most. As a rule of thumb, an excess of two units per player moves the price one step. In this step a price always stays between 1 and 19, so demand alone never sells a drink out or spills it.

Example with two players: together they buy 6 more beers than they sell – 6 divided by 4 is 1.5, rounded up to 2, so beer goes up by 2. If 4 more wines are sold than bought, wine drops by 1. With four players, an excess of 8 moves a drink up by 1 and an excess of 12 by 2.

Important: trades happen at this new price, not the one you saw when you ordered. All sales go through first – you get the new price per unit – then all purchases. If your coins don’t cover everything at the new price, you get as many as you can afford (in the order beer, wine, cocktails, shots, soda). So if you buy with the crowd, you pay more – and if you sell while everyone is buying, you get more.

Setting prices, step 2: the evening’s event

After trading, the event that has been on the board since the start of the round takes effect. Each night 8 of the 14 events come up, each at most once and in random order; the market crash never comes in the first round. An event can push a drink straight to 20 or down to 0 – then it’s sold out or spilled (see below).

The 14 events and what they do:

• Football on TV: Beer +3, Soda +1
• Heatwave: Soda +3, Cocktails +2, Wine −1
• Wine tasting next door: Wine −3
• Stag party: Shots +4, Beer +1
• Happy hour: every drink −2
• Police check outside: Shots −3, Soda +2
• The DJ starts spinning: Cocktails +3, Shots +1
• Rainy weather: Beer −2, Wine +2
• Book reading in the back room: Wine +3, Shots −2
• The regulars are in: Beer +2, Shots +1
• An influencer films the bar: Cocktails +4, Beer −1
• The beer keg is empty: Beer +4
• Ice machine broken: Cocktails −3, Soda −2
• Market crash: every price is halved, rounded down and never below 1 – 15 becomes 7, 3 becomes 1

Setting prices, step 3: the exchange dice

Finally the exchange dice roll – twice in a row, all three dice each time. The drink die shows beer, wine, cocktails, shots, soda or “All”; the direction die shows “up” twice, “down” twice and “pour-out” twice; the amount die shows 1, 1, 2, 2, 3 or 3.

After each roll, the game checks whether a drink has sold out or spilled. What the dice do:

• Up or down: the price rises or falls by the amount rolled. Cocktails and shots swing double – “Shots, down, 3” means −6. Beer, wine and soda move by the amount itself.
• Pour-out: the price stays put. Instead, every player gets as many coins as the amount die shows for each unit of that drink they hold – but only if the drink costs at least 10. Example: you have 6 wines, wine is at 13, and the dice show “Wine, pour-out, 2” – you get 12 coins.
• All: the roll applies to all five drinks. With “All, up, 2”, beer, wine and soda rise by 2 and cocktails and shots by 4; with “All, pour-out”, every drink that costs at least 10 pays out.

Sold out and spilled

If a price reaches 20 – through the event or the dice – the drink is sold out: everyone holding some automatically sells all of it for 25 coins per unit, that’s 20 plus a 5-coin bonus. Then the price starts again at 10.

If a price falls to 0, the drink is spilled: everyone holding some loses their entire stock of it and gets nothing for it. Here too, the price starts again at 10.

Example: shots are at 16 and the dice show “Shots, up, 2” – double, so +4. That makes 20: sold out! Whoever holds 5 shots gets 125 coins. The other way round, a single “down, 3” can spill cocktails or shots priced at 6 or less in one go.

The whisper tip

In every round except the last, the barkeeper whispers next round’s event to one player. The tip goes round in seating order: the first player gets it in round 1, the second in round 2 and so on – with two players, you take turns.

Everyone can see who has the tip, but only that player knows what it says. That lets them buy a round early whatever is about to go up, or get rid of whatever is about to fall – before the others know. But since everyone sees all trades after the round, a conspicuous purchase can give away more than they’d like.

End of the game: closing time at 3 a.m.

After the 3 a.m. round it’s closing time, and your worth counts: your coins plus your stock, valued at the prices after the last round. You don’t have to sell first.

Example: you have 40 coins and 8 wines, and wine ends at 14 – you’re worth 40 + 8 × 14 = 152 coins. The player worth the most wins; if several are worth exactly the same, they share the win.

Play Drink Exchange online with friends or Homies

At Tavern Jack you play the Drink Exchange for free in your browser – on your phone or your computer, no sign-up and no app. Create a room, send the link to your friends, and off you go.

Short of players? Homies can fill the empty seats if you like: our bar’s regulars, computer opponents in three levels. Easy trades more or less on a whim, Normal weighs up what’s worth buying, and Hard also uses the whisper tip and expects the others to chase the event. “Play the Homies” seats three of them at your table. They see what you see – so they only know the whisper tip when it’s their turn to have it.

When at least two people play together, a turn timer runs: everyone has 40 seconds per round for their order, and if you don’t order in time, an autopilot trades for you. New to the exchange? A short practice round walks you through buying, selling and the whisper tip in two rounds, and in the lobby “How it works” explains the rules in short animated scenes.

Origins and ideas for game night

The Drink Exchange isn’t a traditional pub game but Tavern Jack’s own invention – made for this bar and on the menu since October 2026. So there are no other names or editions: the rules on this page are the original.

It’s inspired by real bars and parties that run a drinks exchange, where prices rise and fall with demand during the evening and scroll across a screen like share prices: what lots of people order gets dearer, what nobody wants gets cheaper – and every now and then there’s a “crash” when suddenly everything is cheap. We turned that into a game: you don’t order to drink, but to buy low and sell high.

Want to play it at a real table with pen and paper? Here are a few ideas – not official rules; at Tavern Jack everything above always applies:

• Exchange dice from three ordinary dice: the first picks the drink (1 beer, 2 wine, 3 cocktails, 4 shots, 5 soda, 6 all), the second the direction (1–2 up, 3–4 down, 5–6 pour-out), the third the amount (1–2 → 1, 3–4 → 2, 5–6 → 3). The odds are exactly the same as online.
• Orders on beer mats: everyone writes their order face down on a beer mat or slip of paper, then all reveal at once. One player acts as barkeeper, keeps the price list and works out the demand.
• Event cards: write the 14 events on cards, shuffle and put 8 of them face down in a pile – if the market crash is on top, move it to the bottom. Turn over the top card each round; whoever has the whisper tip may secretly look at the next one.