It is the game taking over pubs across the country.
Those taking part can enjoy a night of free food and drink – so its popularity is hardly surprising.
And it even helps to feed homeless people.
It is Wetherspoons: The Game. Played casually since lockdown, the game has now gone viral, thanks to a Facebook Group with nearly 600K members. This has led to the game being played almost every night in York’s Wetherspoons pubs.
So, is it entirely harmless fun? And what do staff at Wetherspoons pubs in York think about it?
Before we get onto those questions, here’s a quick briefing on the Wetherspoons game, for the uninitiated.
It began when people realised that they could use their Wetherspoons phone app to order food or drink – and send it to random people at any of the chain’s 900 pubs across the UK. All they needed was the location and a table number.
Sometimes they would reward them with free drinks. Other times, they would prank them with multiple portions of peas.
Chris Illman saw an opportunity to harness the game for good – and ask players to fund meals for homeless people.
He set up the Wetherspoons The Game! Facebook Group, which now has 595K members. It boasts that the game “will revolutionise your night out!”
Every night, people post selfies from a Wetherspoons pub on the group page, alongside a plea for freebies, waiting to see if other members will respond.
Some people get a couple of drinks bought for them. Others get a lot, lot more.
The York experience
In York, both Wetherspoons pubs – the Postern Gate on Piccadilly and the Punch Bowl on Blossom Street – regularly feature.
Last Wednesday night, someone in the Punch Bowl said that they were playing for a friend’s birthday – posting a picture of them together and the table number. They soon had a few free rounds.
A few nights before, a woman revealed she was about to meet her “long lost brother” in the Postern Gate– “so any drinks welcome to help calm my nerves”. Several drinks were sent over, and the posters were rewarded with a picture of the brother after he joined the party.
One Punch Bowl group even posted on the Facebook page that they wanted to surprise their mum who didn’t know anything about the game.
They were sent several pints of sweet cider and many rounds of shots that they had send out a new message: “We’ve been told to stop the game as too many shots – thanks guys though!”
We spoke to the staff at the Wetherspoons pubs in York to ask what they made of the game. They told us it could prove challenging – from making multiple trips to one distant table, to monitoring the recipients to check they weren’t getting too drunk.
A shift leader at the Postern Gate commented saying: “It might seem like fun to customers but is a lot of stress for staff to keep up with on a busy night.
“However, the game does provide a lot more sales to the company as a whole which is the main concern of the business.
“Overall, the game is good for sales despite the short-term stress it may cause.”
Another member of the Postern Gate staff told YorkMix “On a night where the pub is busy, and people are using the game to get multiple small orders such as kid’s milks and peas it makes our services slower for other customers.
“When the game is used, it usually accumulates to a large amount of alcohol being ordered to one table on individual checks which we then have to monitor as staff”.
When multiple orders come in for the same people, staff do sometimes have to step in and put an end to the game due to the large consumption of alcohol some people receive which leads to drunk and disorderly behaviour.
But the good that the game does is undeniable. If only 0.05% of the group’s membership pays forward a classic burger meal to the pub, that meets founder Chris Illman’s target of feeding 300 homeless and vulnerable people.
On Thursday (29 February) Chris is going live on the Facebook page to explain how and where to send meals. Why not take a look? It’s a great way to join in with this viral game and do some real good at the same time.