Dice games
Pig
Reach one hundred points by piling up rolls, without having them wiped out by a one.
- players
- 2–10
- minutes
- 10
- variants
- 2
You’ll need: 1 die. Marquoir gives you all the rules and keeps score.
Setup
- A single die, a score sheet, two to ten players.
- Everyone starts at zero.
How to play
- On your turn, roll the die as many times as you like, adding up the results.
- You may stop at any time: the running total is then written down.
- But a one wipes out everything you had built up during the turn, and play passes on.
Scoring
- Each face scores its value, from two to six.
- A one scores nothing and ends the turn: the turn total drops to zero.
- A score once written down is safe: it can no longer be lost.
End of the game
- The first to one hundred points wins, but the round is finished to give the others a chance.
House rules and pitfalls
- The odds suggest stopping at around twenty points per turn; experience suggests earlier.
- In the two-dice version, a single one ends the turn as usual, but a double one wipes out the score already written down, not just the turn total.
Variants
Game to
100 points
50 points
chosen when starting, the scorer follows
Frequently asked questions
When should you stop in Pig?
The maths gives an optimum of around twenty points per turn: beyond that, the risk of losing it all to a one outweighs the expected gain. But if an opponent is close to a hundred, you obviously have to take more risks.
The box
- Age
- Ages 8+
- Origin
- Traditional game, with no specific designer or publisher
- Mechanics
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