This July, during the first days of the Hezbollah/Israeli war, I lost a close game of Beirut to some guys from Boston College.

It was Gardner Street, our turf, and so the scene lent itself to a playful microcosm: enemies lobbing insults and projectiles at each other, spewing accusations. “You captured two of our soldiers!” “Your elbow was over the line!”

But it wasn’t symbolic. Nowhere in the game was there a nod to the fact that its namesake was the capital city of a country at war.

As the school year begins, seeing how the game of Beirut will adjust to the war will be an interesting study in how global events of life and death penetrate college culture, how real bombing will reverberate in getting bombed.

What is sometimes called Beer Pong in other parts of the country is more commonly referred to as Beirut in the northeast. The rules possess a level of variation and ambiguity one would expect from a game that involves getting drunk.

Details can be found at Beirut-guide.com, which explains how all Beirut is Beer Pong but not all Beer Pong is Beirut just as all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

The game is unbelievably enjoyable. When you hit a shot, the ball smacks with a quick plunk into the cup and you can almost feel the fun splashing out into the room. The good shot is light and profound at the same time, bringing a sort of understated pleasure to your game and night.

The table is often a stage. Beirut takes the ability to show off that sports provide a step further by eliminating delay. Hitting a shot is scoring a touchdown and hanging out with the cheerleaders at the same time.

Beirut has relatives, and, like most relatives, you realize how weird they are every time they come around. Power Hour, for example, is neurotic hedonism. It’s for people who want to know exactly how much of their life they’ve pissed away drinking — a form of getting wasted for the college student who doesn’t have time to waste.

Flip cup, on the other hand, was probably invented when someone knocked their own drink upside down and deemed himself a “winner” when he was able to right it. “Look I invented a game and I won it.” “No, you had my respect and you lost it.” The people at the party who are playing Flip Cup are the ones who were asked to throw a ping-pong ball into a cup of beer from six feet away and said, “Hey man, I didn’t come here to think.”

But a game of Beirut is longer, and in a matter of seconds it can assume incredible significance. The world dissolves away, and in an epic, silly way only right and wrong remain.

At a party in England, a casual game with me and another American on one team and an Australian and a New Zealander on the other escalated into the match for the unofficial Beirut championship. We won a close game. But it wasn’t about us. It was about the rainforest.

Beirut has spread because it consolidates the exigencies of partying: the proxy war action of the game becomes part of the drinking. It is essentially a dropping of pretense where the superficial gestures — flinging pointed projectiles at a bull’s-eye, knocking clacking balls into pockets — combine with the actual reason people are doing them, the drinking.

The atmosphere of a party seems to have condensed from three looser actions into two more deliberate ones: drinking plus games plus socializing has become drinking-game socializing. No need to walk and chew gum — just focus on trying to walk.

Beirut is indeed a game of skill, but it’s also ridiculous. “Hey, remember when your parents split up? How’d that make you feel?” That is something that you might actually hear from a friend to psyche you out. There’s a flagrance to the game — and to its name as well. The name “Beirut” is said to have been given to the game that came out of Lehigh University or Bucknell University in the mid-80s.

Its development included instances of convergent evolution, including Beer Pong’s older, slower emergence, which is reported to have happened at Dartmouth College. Anyone interested can explore the Internet’s detailed chronologies that people have meticulously noted about events that happened during nights they blacked out.

The name likely refers to the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s, ping pong balls being analogous to the volley of shells from the combatants. Also, and this is just a personal theory, the word sounds like “beer.”

There’s a bit of irony in the title. It boasts a global familiarity during a game that glimpses college students at their most ignorant, when they are most cut off from the events and problems of the real world. It rings with a sense of knowledge misappropriated, the erudite hijacked and superimposed on the larks of a meathead frat boy.

At the end of August, as the conflict begins to cool, my friends and I are on Treasure Island in Shapleigh, Maine. The path opens into a backyard, a party revolving around coolers and a Beirut table. The celebration is for a marine’s graduation from Paris Island.

“That’s a city right?” “Isn’t there a war going on there?” and “Yea, people are, like, getting killed there” are the responses around the table as the conflict is broached. A young man wearing a Brine Lacrosse shirt (though he only “played a little his freshman year”) said the conflict was “’cause of the Chinese.”

On Thatcher Street in Brookline on Sept. 9 a Suffolk student named Louie wears a striped polo shirt. The collar is popped, and the sleeves are pushed into limbo on his biceps, not quite able to make it over.

He and his friend — who looks eerily like Mr. Opportunity from the Honda commercials — face two girls in a quick game of six-cup.

With three cups left on the guys’ side, the females call for a re-rack. The gentlemen ask how the women “want it.”

“What do you want, balls?” asks Louie’s friend as he arranges them in a formation with two cups behind one.

Then Louie rearranges the three cups in a straight line: “Or do you want a boner?”

“You want balls, or a boner, haha,” The two feed off each other like Beavis and Butthead.

“You want a boner or balls?”

Minutes later I see Louie hit the winning shot. He pumps his arm and looks into the room. He yells out a “whoo!” and then gives a half-drunk grin that seems to order our praise.

And with that smile it is easier to understand the anger and hatred that starts wars — even civil ones.

Last Saturday my old roommate invited me to a party.

We stand around the kitchen, red Solo cups stacked and waiting in the dining room.

A recent graduate named Andre´ wears a white t-shirt and jeans rolled at the bottom. He has a touch of something red on his neck, one of those subtle splotches that you can never tell if it’s acne or just aggravation from the razor, the blight of adolescence or the price of being an adult.

Andre´ talks to a kid named Rob, another recent grad, about the war in Lebanon. In an unassuming tone he deftly breaks down the issue, interested and concerned — Hezbollah’s missile capabilities and the US’s historical support for Israel — as if he were talking about a new pitcher the Sox just signed.

I ask him what he does. Before telling me he works in human resources, he jokes, “Oh, me? I don’t do anything. I just drink beer.”

His presence gives new meaning to “the life of the party.”

Minutes later, the game starts.