Roll Five
Our five-dice scoring game in the classic Yacht tradition. Three rolls a turn, hold what you like, and fill all thirteen boxes for the highest total.
One link, live dice, up to six players.
How to play
- Roll all five dice, then roll up to two more times, holding any dice you want to keep.
- After any roll, score the hand into one open box on your card. Every box can be used exactly once, so every game is thirteen turns.
- If the hand fits nothing useful, you must still fill a box, taking 0. Choosing which box to sacrifice is half the game.
- Score 63 or more across the upper section and earn a 35 point bonus. Three of each face gets you there exactly.
- Roll a second five of a kind after filling the Roll Five box with 50, and every extra one is worth 100 bonus points, whichever box you score the hand into.
The scorecard
This table is rendered from the same data the game engine scores with, so the rules on screen and the rules in the code cannot disagree.
| Box | Points |
|---|---|
| Ones | sum of 1s |
| Twos | sum of 2s |
| Threes | sum of 3s |
| Fours | sum of 4s |
| Fives | sum of 5s |
| Sixes | sum of 6s |
| Three of a kind | sum of all five dice |
| Four of a kind | sum of all five dice |
| Full house | 25 |
| Small straight | 30 |
| Large straight | 40 |
| Roll Five | 50 |
| Chance | sum of all five dice |
A full house is exactly a triple and a pair. A small straight is any four faces in a row, a large straight all five.
The odds, in one roll
The chance that a single throw of five dice qualifies for each box, enumerated exactly over all 7,776 possible rolls rather than estimated. Three rolls and clever holding improve on every one of these, which is the whole art of the game.
| Combination | One-roll chance |
|---|---|
| Three of a kind | 21.3% |
| Small straight | 15.43% |
| Full house | 3.86% |
| Large straight | 3.09% |
| Four of a kind | 2.01% |
| Roll Five | 0.08% |
The shape of a good game falls out of this table. Straights are fragile: chase them early in a turn or not at all. Kinds grow naturally from held pairs, and the upper section is the steady work that pays the 35 point bonus, which is usually the difference in a close match.
The tradition, and the computer
Five-dice scorecard games go back to Yacht, a public tradition played on ships and kitchen tables for a century. Roll Five is our own take on that tradition with its own scorecard, tuned so the bonus race and the scratch decisions stay sharp.
The computer opponent weighs every possible hold against the exact odds of what a reroll can produce, values upper-bonus pace, and hates scratching straights. It plays a solid strategy rather than a solved one, which keeps it beatable and honest about being so.