Five Dice Games You Can Play With Ordinary Six-Sided Dice
A handful of six-sided dice is the most versatile thing in a games cupboard. These five games need nothing else — no board, no cards, at most a pen and paper — and between them they cover about every mood a table can be in.
Every one of them works with the dice roller too, if the dice are in the other room.
Pig — one die, thirty seconds to teach
You need: one d6, paper for scores, two or more players.
On your turn, roll the die as many times as you like, adding each result to a running total for the turn.
- Roll anything from 2 to 6 and it adds to your turn total. You may roll again or stop.
- Stop, and your turn total is banked into your score permanently.
- Roll a 1 and you lose everything accumulated this turn. Your turn ends immediately and you bank nothing.
First player to 100 wins.
That is the entire game, and it is a genuinely good one because the decision is agonising in a way that scales. With 4 banked points you should obviously keep rolling; with 38 on the table you should obviously stop; in between is where the game lives.
The known best strategy is “hold at 20”: stop as soon as your turn total reaches 20. The reasoning is that each additional roll risks the whole turn total against an expected gain of about 4 points (the average of 2–6 is 4, and the 1 costs you everything). Once your turn total passes roughly 20, the risk outweighs the gain. The exception is the endgame — if an opponent is about to win, keep rolling regardless, because second place is worth nothing.
Two-dice Pig is a common variant: a single 1 ends your turn as normal, but double 1 wipes your entire banked score, not just the turn.
Farkle — six dice, push your luck
You need: six d6, paper, two or more players.
Roll all six dice. Set aside at least one scoring die, then choose to bank your points or reroll the remaining dice. If a roll produces no scoring dice at all, you “farkle” — you lose everything accumulated this turn and pass the dice.
Scoring:
| Combination | Points |
|---|---|
| Single 1 | 100 |
| Single 5 | 50 |
| Three 1s | 1,000 |
| Three 2s | 200 |
| Three 3s | 300 |
| Three 4s | 400 |
| Three 5s | 500 |
| Three 6s | 600 |
| Four of a kind | double the three-of-a-kind value |
| Five of a kind | triple it |
| Six of a kind | quadruple it |
| Straight 1–6 | 1,500 |
| Three pairs | 1,500 |
Only 1s and 5s score on their own. A 3 by itself is worth nothing.
Hot dice: if all six dice end up scoring, you may pick all six back up and keep rolling with your turn total intact. This is where enormous turns come from, and where enormous losses come from.
Winning: first to 10,000. Many groups add an entry rule — you must score 500 in a single turn before you can start banking at all — and give every other player one final turn once someone crosses the line.
The tension is the same as Pig but with more texture, because you are choosing which dice to keep as well as whether to continue. Setting aside a single 100-point 1 and rerolling five dice is usually right; setting aside two 5s for 100 points and rerolling four is usually not.
Yahtzee — five dice, thirteen rounds
You need: five d6, a scorecard, one or more players.
Each turn you roll five dice, then may reroll any number of them twice more — three rolls total. Then you must assign the result to one of thirteen categories on your card. Every category is used exactly once, so the game is thirteen turns long and the real skill is deciding what to sacrifice.
Upper section — score the total of the matching dice only:
| Category | Scores |
|---|---|
| Ones through Sixes | sum of dice showing that number |
If your upper section totals 63 or more, you get a 35-point bonus. 63 is exactly three of each number, which is the benchmark to aim at.
Lower section:
| Category | Scores |
|---|---|
| Three of a kind | total of all five dice |
| Four of a kind | total of all five dice |
| Full house (three + two) | 25 |
| Small straight (four in a row) | 30 |
| Large straight (five in a row) | 40 |
| Yahtzee (five of a kind) | 50 |
| Chance | total of all five dice |
A second Yahtzee in the same game scores a 100-point bonus on top.
If a roll fits nothing useful, you must still enter something — usually a zero in a category you have written off. Deliberately zeroing Ones early is a standard move; zeroing Yahtzee is an admission of defeat.
Liar’s Dice — five dice each, and a poker face
You need: five d6 per player and an opaque cup each. Three or more players is best.
Everyone rolls their five dice under the cup and looks at their own without showing anyone.
Play passes around the table with bids. A bid is a quantity and a face — “four fives” claims that among all the dice on the table, there are at least four dice showing 5. Ones are wild and count as any face.
Each bid must raise the previous one: either a higher quantity of any face, or the same quantity of a higher face. “Four fives” can be raised to “four sixes” or “five twos”, but not “four threes”.
Instead of bidding, you may challenge the previous bid. Everyone lifts their cups and counts.
- If the bid was correct — there are at least that many — the challenger loses a die.
- If the bid was wrong, the bidder loses a die.
Play continues with the loser down to four dice, then three, and so on. A player who loses their last die is out; the last player standing wins.
The game is almost entirely about reading people. Your own five dice tell you very little about thirty dice on the table, so a bid is mostly a statement about what you want others to believe. Ones being wild is the detail that makes early bids much safer than they look.
Ship, Captain and Crew — five dice, five minutes
You need: five d6, two or more players.
You are trying to roll a 6 (the ship), a 5 (the captain) and a 4 (the crew), in that order, using up to three rolls.
On each roll you must set aside a 6 if you do not have one, then a 5, then a 4 — you cannot keep a 5 before you have your 6. Once all three are set aside, the remaining two dice are your cargo, and their total is your score. You may use any remaining rolls to try to improve the cargo.
Fail to get all of ship, captain and crew within three rolls and you score nothing.
Highest cargo wins the round, with 12 being the maximum. Traditionally played for a pot, one round at a time, and traditionally played in bars, which explains the brevity.
If you want to go further
All five of these are built on the same fact: a single d6 is flat, but several d6 make a bell curve. Pig and Farkle both turn on knowing when an expected gain stops being worth an accumulated risk, and Yahtzee’s whole scorecard is a ranking of how unlikely each combination is.
For anything you would rather not do arithmetic for, the roller accepts standard notation — 5d6 deals a Yahtzee hand in one click.