Roll Five

How to play

1. Roll all five dice, then roll up to two more times, holding any dice you want to keep.
2. 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.
3. If the hand fits nothing useful, you must still fill a box, taking 0. Choosing which box to sacrifice is half the game.
4. Score 63 or more across the upper section and earn a 35 point bonus. Three of each face gets you there exactly.
5. 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.

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.

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.

Encore rules, our house variant

Flip the rules switch above the game to Encore and repeat glory starts paying. Roll a premium hand you have already banked, a full house, either straight, or a Roll Five, and you may take it again as a bonus: the second of a shape pays double its face value, the third triple, and so on. An 80 point second large straight is real money.

The catch is the whole game: every encore costs a scratch. You choose any open box and zero it on the spot, so the night fills the same thirteen boxes either way, and the question becomes which box you are willing to bury for the bonus. Scratched boxes never pay encores, and under these rules the automatic extra Roll Five bonus retires; five of a kind earns its keep through encores like everything else.

This variant came from a player at this table, which is the best place for rules to come from. The computer opponent weighs encores against the box it would cost. Rooms and the daily challenge play classic rules.

Free printable score card

A clean PDF score card for the kitchen table: the full thirteen-box card with the upper bonus and extra Roll Fives, six games to a sheet. It works for Roll Five, classic Yacht, and every five-dice scorecard game in the family.

Download the score card (PDF)Letter size, prints in plain black and white.

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, and our page on the classic game sets its original card beside this one. 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.

More dice gamesThe classic Yacht gamePlay FarkleJust roll dice