Untappd

I know this isn't strictly games and I know that all my beer loving pals are laughing at me for being so late to the party but god damn I've just got into this thing and I fucking love it.

So I love drinking, I know that makes me sound like an alcoholic but I do love a good drink.  When I come home from work or with a nice meal, a nice glass of beer or some other kind of beverage hits the goddamn spot.  Before any fucking puritan nutters want to get on my case, I'm not drinking to get smashed every day, just a little wind down and it just happens to taste pretty good too.

Untappd is an app for phones and I think they have a website where you can track your beer drinking.  The reason I'm posting it as part of this blog is that it effectively gamifies your beer drinking habits.  The app tracks how many "check-ins" of beer that you make as well as how many distinct beers.  This turns the act of drinking a beer into a sort of "gotta drink 'em all" game that you play with yourself.  Now when I go to my shop to buy a can or two, instead of just getting the same old shit I always buy, I'm trying new things all the time just to make this little counter go up.

On top of that, the thing has fucking achievements.  Usually I hate achievements but whenever this app tells me that I've earned a "badge" then I do get a bit happy.  These are for things like numbers of distinct beers, drinking at certain times, drinking certain types of beer so on and so on.  The app also comes with a kind of beer detection feature where you can see what beers are being sold near you so you could even use this thing to discover new little bars that you might have not tried before.

If you're into beer you should give Untappd a go.  The original purpose was probably for beer snobs to document their exploits but it's so game-like that even twats like me can have fun with it.