Mates — their choices are your problem now

Land on Mates and nobody drinks straight away. First you pick someone at the table to be your buddy. From then on, whenever they drink, you drink too. You're allowed more than one buddy, which sounds generous until you do the maths.

At a real table this is where the tactics come out. Some people pick their steadiest mate for an easy ride. Others pick the one already three pints in, not realising they've just signed up to match them. There's always someone who tries picking the designated driver as a loophole, and always someone else quick to point out that's not in the spirit of it.

The honest tactic is to pick someone drinking at roughly your own pace, not the fastest or slowest person in the room. Say the pick out loud, too — half the arguments this wedge causes come from someone insisting they never actually agreed to it.

Mates sits in the 1st Circle, one of only ten wedges in that inner ring, so it turns up early and often. Pacts stack on pacts as the evening goes on, until half the table is drinking on someone else's account and nobody can quite trace it back to the start.