How to Play Farkle

Six dice, one decision repeated over and over: roll again, or bank what you have? Everything else is detail.

What you need

Six standard six-sided dice, two or more players, something to keep score on, and a surface people can reach. A cup or a shallow bowl keeps dice off the floor but is not required. Farkle is a traditional dice game in the public domain — you will also see it sold as Greed, Zilch, Ten Thousand, Hot Dice and Squelch, with small rule differences between them.

The object

Be the first player past the target score, which is almost always 10,000 points. Points come from rolling scoring combinations and choosing to bank them before your luck runs out. Points you have not banked are not yours.

A turn, step by step

1. Roll all six dice.
2. Set aside at least one scoring die. A single 1 is worth 100, a single 5 is worth 50, and three of a kind and above are worth more — the scoring chart has the full list. You may set aside more than the minimum, and in most situations you should.
3. Decide: roll again, or bank?
   • Roll again with only the dice you did not set aside. The points you have set aside this turn stay on the table and keep accumulating.
   • Bank and the accumulated points are added to your score permanently. Your turn ends and play passes to the left.
4. Repeat until you bank or Farkle.

Farkling

If a roll contains no scoring dice at all, you have Farkled. Your turn ends immediately and everything accumulated during that turn is lost — all of it, however much it was. This is the whole tension of the game: a turn worth 2,000 points is worth exactly zero until you bank it.

A roll of 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 2 is a Farkle: no 1s, no 5s, no triple, no straight, no three pairs. A roll of 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 5 is not, because of that single 5.

Hot dice

If every one of the dice still in play scores and you set all of them aside, you have hot dice: pick up all six and keep rolling, with your accumulated points carried forward. There is no limit to how many times this can happen in one turn, which is how the occasional five-figure turn happens.

Note that hot dice apply to the dice in play, not all six. If you have two dice left and both are 1s, that is hot dice too.

Getting on the board

Most tables require a minimum single-turn score before a player's points start counting — commonly 500, sometimes 350 or 1,000. Until you clear it in one turn, banking gains you nothing and your score stays at zero. Once you are "on the board", you may bank any amount, even 50.

This rule bites hardest at the start of the game, and it is the single most common source of confusion for new players. The scorekeeper on this site tracks it per player and will warn you before you bank a turn that would score nothing.

Ending the game

When a player banks a total of 10,000 or more, every other player gets one final turn to beat them. This matters: a player trailing by 1,500 can still steal the game with one good turn, so crossing the line first is not the same as winning. If two players end level on the highest score, it is a tie.

Etiquette and common disputes

• Dice that leave the table are usually rerolled, but agree on this before you start rather than after.
• You must set aside at least one scoring die per roll. You cannot decline to keep anything and reroll all six.
• Every die you keep must be part of a scoring combination. You cannot tuck a 3 in with three 1s.
• Announce your intention before you roll. Picking up dice and rolling before the table has seen what you set aside is how arguments start.

Ready to play?

Open the scorekeeper, add your players, and roll. It handles the totals, the opening threshold and the final round, so you can pay attention to the dice instead of the arithmetic. If your family plays with different combinations or a different target, set them up on the variants page first.