Perl Hacks

Hack #37. Drink to the CPAN

Play London.pm's CPAN Drinking Game—but responsibly.

The CPAN drinking game tests your knowledge of the CPAN. The goal of the game, depending on who you ask, is either to prove that you have an incredibly deep knowledge of the CPAN or to get incredibly drunk. An alternate goal is to learn about modules you never even knew existed. Just try to remember them.

Running the Hack

The first player, Audrey, takes a drink and names a CPAN module: Devel::Cover. Play passes to Barbie, who's sitting immediately to Audrey's right. Barbie needs to drink and then come up with a released module which starts with C, the first letter of the last part of Audrey's module. If he can't, he drinks and play passes to the next player.

If Barbie names a module with three parts, perhaps Crypt::SSLeay::X509, play skips over chromatic, who's sitting to his right. The same applies if he managed to pull out a module name with four, five, or more parts.

Domm picks up with X. He drinks and pulls out XML::XPath. Because the last part starts with the same letter as the first part, the direction of play reverses and it's chromatic's turn.

chromatic drinks and, sadly, can't come up with anything and has to pass. He's now out of the game. Audrey drinks and names XML::Simple. Play continues counterclockwise to Domm, who needs to come up with something starting with S.

The winner is the last remaining player.

Hacking the Hack

Try whiskey!

Seriously, as bar-rific as the game sounds, you don't have to drink alcohol. Try another beverage—hot tea is good, root beer is good, and anything with caffeine can change the rule for losing in interesting ways.

Some variants of the game require Barbie to drink until he can name a module. This can take a while.

The author recommends never challenging Audrey to the CPAN drinking game.