The world is full of drinking games, but none have more voraciously consumed at college and university campuses than Beer Pong. The game is simple - two players try to expertly bounce a ping pong ball into the other’s plastic beer cup. The one who misses has to drink the other’s beer. Since alcohol will impair your motor skills, players spend more time losing and getting drunk than scoring, and so the goal is to try for one of those fluke shots that can turn into legend the next day when rose-tinted memories rise up as the hangovers fade.As you might expect the game has drawn an air of infamy and controversy, partly for encouraging irresponsible drinking, and partly because drinking from a cup loaded with a ball that has touched every surface in the room is, well, unsanitary. Like all forbidden trends, it’s one that has trickled down to high schools where teens are just as eager to prove themselves socially and have come up with their own variations.

Cuponk seems to be an attempt to legitimize the fratboy game, to shift the focus away from drinking and put it back onto the culture of rebellious skills made popular by skateboarding and extreme sports. It involves a single cup, a single ping pong ball, and a deck of cards each describing a trick needed to get the ball into the cup. Each player draws a card and has to duplicate the trick described. You might have to ricochet it off of a door first, drop it from your nose, or send it rolling along the backside of the couch to have it fall in.

Obviously you can play the game with any cup and any ping pong ball, so Hasbro has evolved the concept into an electronic game and distraction toy aimed at youths and sober geeks enamored with all things involving geometry and physics.

The electronic cup is equipped with sensors that detect when a ball has landed inside, triggering a light ring to flash and random sound clips to play in celebration. There are three styles of cups avaialble, offering zombie, crazy gorilla, and Mexican wrestling themes. Drop a ball into the wrestler’s cup and you’ll hear crowd cheers, boos, bells, and the physical exchanges of body blows. Drop a ball into the zombie cup and you’ll hear groans, screams, chainsaws, sirens, and horror movie stings. Really, its the best part.

Each cup is packaged with a cardboard funnel designed to make the cup larger in size. The instructions say it’s just for special trick shots, but between you and me it’s there to make the game easier. The truth is that Cuponk is fiendishly hard, bordering on being dull. Ping Pong balls are notoriously unpredictable and high bouncers, and so trying to get one to bounce reliably in even the simplest ways is very, very hard. Hasbro’s balls are not exactly to table tennis league standards and have noticeable seams on them that change up the way the balls bounce. After a few rounds you’ll begin to understand why the original game involves alcohol.

Now, to be clear Hasbro has never mentioned Beer Pong or any of its variations with their electronic game, aimed at ages nine and up, but they use fratboy celebrities Bam Margera and Billy “Balls” Mark to market it, so you can draw your own conclusions. The videos available online at Hasbro’s site and on YouTube show tricks of staggering skill that few players will ever be able to repeat and those who try had best get used to disappointment.

If there’s an upside to Cuponk as a game it’s that it encourages players to come up with their own game. The rules are offered only as a guideline and the kit includes a number of blank cards for players to fill in their own tricks. It is, after all, just a cup and a ball, so the rest is up to the player’s imagination.

For myself Cuponk holds more value as an urban street art project than as a game of skill. The cups are extremely well-made, the sounds fiendishly delightful, and the artwork, from the graphics on the cards and the sides of the cups to the store packaging itself is inventive and doesn’t hold back in style or attitude.

I love the “Let It R.I.P.” kit which includes ping pong balls stamped with eyeball and brains graphics. The cup depicts a group of zombies playing Cuponk in a graveyard while the cardboard funnel offers day-glo Night of the Living Dead-style silhouettes. Between the wild graphics and the screamin’ sound effects, there’s a strong pyschobilly vibe that, for $15, makes it worth buying just as a desktop toy, as a cup I can occasionally toss pens and knick knacks into just for a reaction.