After the success of Cards Against Humanity, there's been a seemingly endless stream of party games that set out to shock or titillate. Sex, Drugs or Rock-N-Roll (SDR) is very much in that tradition.
The idea of the game could hardly be simpler. Open the box and you'll find a pack of special cards: 26 of these are letter cards, literally just a card showing a letter of the alphabet. In addition there are 10 'status' cards that are green on one side and red on the other. These are illustrated with scenes representing - you guessed it - Sex, Drugs or Rock'n'roll. The Rock'n'roll illustrations are inoffensive but the Drugs and Sex pictures are rather graphic: certainly Not-In-Front-of-the-Children and NSFW (Not Safe For Work).
In addition to the cards, the game box includes ten 15-second sand timers. To play the game, each player (2-10) or team takes a sand timer and one of the red/green status cards. A letter card is revealed and players flip their timers and have 15 seconds to come up with a word that starts with that letter and which is associated with Sex, Drugs or Rock'n'roll. If they fail to come up with a word accepted by the other players before the sand runs out, they are out for the round (they turn their status card over to its red side to indicate that they are out). Play proceeds until there's just one player left, and it's them that wins the card. Play continues till all the alphabet cards are won. You probably won't want to play through the entire alphabet, however, especially with a higher player count, or you'll risk the game outstaying its welcome.
As you'd expect, it's easy enough to come up with immediate variants to the rules, and the game comes with several suggestions for these. This is very much a party game and so it's no surprise that one of the suggested variants is to play SDR as a drinking game. Despite an injunction tho' to 'please drink responsibly', you must expect to get very drunk if you play SDR with any alcoholic drink. That said, this is a game that's very dependent on its players and it will almost certainly be at its rowdy best after players have downed a few drinks.
Sex, Drugs or Rock-N-Roll is due to come to Kickstarter in the next few weeks. We'll add a link to the KS campaign when it goes live.