Farkle
The classic push-your-luck dice game. Roll six dice, set scoring dice aside, and decide: bank what you have, or roll again and risk losing the lot.
How to play
- Roll all six dice.
- Set aside at least one scoring die or combination. Ones, fives, and sets of three or more always score.
- Either bank your turn points, or roll the remaining dice to add more. A roll with no scoring dice is a farkle: your turn ends and every unbanked point from this turn is lost.
- If all six dice score, that is hot dice: all six come back and the turn keeps going.
- First to bank 10,000 triggers the final round, and everyone else gets one last turn to beat them. Highest total wins.
Scoring
Farkle is a traditional game with many house variants, so to be clear: this is the table this game uses, and it is rendered from the same data the game engine scores with, so the two 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 |
Three pairs means three different pairs. Every die you set aside has to score: keeping a lone 2 is not a legal move.
The odds of farkling
The heart of every bank-or-roll decision. These are exact figures, enumerated over every possible roll rather than estimated, in keeping with how every number on this site is produced.
| Dice you roll | Chance of a farkle |
|---|---|
| 6 | 2.31% |
| 5 | 7.72% |
| 4 | 15.74% |
| 3 | 27.78% |
| 2 | 44.44% |
| 1 | 66.67% |
The table explains the game’s feel. Six or five dice almost never farkle, so early rolls are nearly free. One or two dice farkle 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. A common yardstick: keep rolling with four or more dice, and think hard about banking once you are down to two.
About the computer player
The computer weighs every legal keep against the exact farkle odds in the table above, banks wins, and refuses to give up in the final round. It plays a solid push-your-luck strategy rather than a solved one, which keeps it beatable and honest about being so.