Ship, Captain and Crew
The old navy game. Five dice, three rolls: find your ship, your captain and your crew in order, and whatever is left over is cargo. Highest cargo across five rounds takes the match.
One link, live dice, up to six players.
How to play
- Roll five dice, up to three times a turn. You must set aside a 6 (the ship) first, then a 5 (the captain), then a 4 (the crew), and each die serves one role only. A 5 rolled before you have your 6 counts for nothing. The game sets these aside for you, because the rules give you no choice.
- Once ship, captain and crew are aboard, the two dice left over are your cargo, worth their sum. With rolls to spare you may reroll both cargo dice, but you take the new total, better or worse.
- Fail to muster all three in three rolls and the turn scores nothing.
- Five rounds each, highest total cargo wins. A tie sails extra rounds until someone leads. Solo play is ten turns for a high score.
The odds of mustering the crew
Starting a turn fresh, the chance of getting ship, captain and crew aboard within your three rolls is exactly 54%. Enumerated over every possible sequence of rolls, not estimated, in keeping with how every number on this site is produced. Nearly half of all turns score nothing at all, which is why a single fat cargo can swing a whole match.
The cargo reroll, priced exactly
Two dice average 7, so the whole decision comes down to what a reroll is worth against what is on the table:
| Rerolls in hand | A reroll is worth | So keep cargo of |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7.00 | 7 or more |
| 2 | 7.97 | 8 or more |
In plain terms: with one reroll left, keep a 7. With two in hand, a 7 is worth risking. The only time to break the rule is the last round of a match you are losing, where a cargo that does not take the lead is worth nothing whatever the arithmetic says.
About the computer player
Almost every move in this game is forced, so the computer has exactly one thing to think about, and it thinks about it perfectly: it keeps cargo worth at least the reroll values in the table above, and on its final turn it rerolls anything that would still lose the match. In a game this luck-driven, that makes it a fair rival rather than an unbeatable one.