The 10,000 dice game
The campfire classic. Six dice, set aside what scores, and decide with every roll: bank what you have, or push on and risk losing the lot. First to 10,000 wins.
One link, live dice, up to six players.
10,000, Ten Thousand, Zilch, Farkle: one game
10,000 is the traditional folk game, passed around kitchen tables and campsites for generations under a pile of names: Ten Thousand, Zilch, Dix Mille, and in its boxed retail form, Farkle. The bones are always the same: six dice, ones and fives and sets score, a roll with nothing scoring ends your turn and burns your points, and the race runs to 10,000. The game above is our house table of that tradition, and it is the same engine that powers our Farkle page, because they are honestly the same game.
How to play 10,000
- Roll all six dice.
- Set aside at least one scoring die or combination. Ones, fives, and sets of three or more always score; a lone 2, 3, 4 or 6 never does.
- Bank your turn points, or roll the remaining dice to build them higher. Roll nothing that scores and you have zilched: the turn ends and every unbanked point from it is gone.
- Score with all six dice and they all come back: hot dice, and the turn rolls on.
- First to bank 10,000 triggers the final round, and everyone else gets one last turn to beat them. Highest total wins.
Scoring
This is the table our game plays, rendered from the same data the engine scores with, so the rules on screen and the rules in the code cannot disagree.
| Combination | Points |
|---|---|
| Single 1 | 100 |
| Single 5 | 50 |
| Three 1s | 1,000 |
| Three of a kind (2 to 6) | face × 100 |
| Each extra die of that kind | doubles it |
| Straight, 1 through 6 | 1,500 |
| Three different pairs | 1,500 |
| Two triplets | 2,500 |
House variants you will meet
A century of kitchen tables means every family plays 10,000 a little differently. The variants below are the ones you are most likely to run into; our table plays none of them, on the grounds that the plain race is the best introduction, but they are all fine additions once everyone knows the game.
- Opening at 500 or 1,000. You cannot bank anything until a single turn earns the opening amount, which makes the first turns spicier.
- Three zilches. Zilch three turns in a row and you lose 500 or 1,000 from your banked score.
- Piggybacking. The next player may pick up your leftover dice and your unbanked points, inheriting your risk along with your riches.
- Exact finish. The game ends only on exactly 10,000, and overshooting wastes the turn.
- No specials. Some tables score only ones, fives and triples, dropping straights, three pairs and two triplets entirely.
The odds of zilching
The heart of every bank-or-roll decision, enumerated exactly over every possible roll rather than estimated, in keeping with how every number on this site is produced:
| Dice you roll | Chance of a zilch |
|---|---|
| 6 | 2.31% |
| 5 | 7.72% |
| 4 | 15.74% |
| 3 | 27.78% |
| 2 | 44.44% |
| 1 | 66.67% |
Six or five dice almost never zilch, so early rolls are nearly free. One or two dice fail roughly half the time, which is why pressing on with two dice and 800 points on the table is the moment the whole game lives in.