Flanki: Drinking Games and Traditions of Students at AGH University of Kraków

This paper examines Flanki, a competitive drinking game also known internationally as Flunkyball, as it is practiced among students at AGH University of Kraków. In Flanki, two teams take turns trying to knock down an empty beer can standing between them, and the team that misses must drink until the can is set upright, with the first team to finish its drinks winning. The authors frame the game through the lenses of Huizinga's concept of play and Caillois's categories of agon and ilinx, arguing that its appeal lies in combining rivalry, symbolic recognition, and alcohol-induced disorientation. The study situates Flanki within a broader literature on college drinking games, which has been dominated by American research and has rarely treated such games as objects of game studies.

The paper emphasizes the risks attached to drinking games, including blackouts, rapid alcohol intake, and elevated vulnerability to sexual assault, with women reportedly reaching higher blood alcohol levels and some participants using games to get others intoxicated. It also places Flanki within a Polish context in which alcohol use among students is very high, with a cited figure of 95.5% of Polish students drinking and 84.8% of Kraków students doing so, and beer as the dominant beverage. The authors argue that the game's cheerful, sporting character may mask unhealthy drinking patterns.

Preliminary observations from the campus recreation area, the main site of Flanki games, describe Thursday gatherings with multiple simultaneous matches, a magic-circle atmosphere largely free of spoilsports, and folk traditions such as pausing games at 21:37 to sing "Barka" in memory of Pope John Paul II, followed by rival-university chants.

The empirical component is a survey of 263 AGH students, stratified by gender, faculty, and year of study. Among students who drink, roughly half reported participating in drinking games, and over 85% of those players reported playing Flanki. The leading stated motives were having fun (93.97%), socializing (75%), and competition (45.69%), with competition selected about twice as often by men (59.68%) as by women (30.19%). The authors note that interviews with players and spectators are ongoing to deepen understanding of Flanki's role in social bonding and folklore.