421 dice game: three dice, three rolls and your combination

How to use the 421 dice on this page

The tool recreates a turn of 421 as it is played on a French bar counter: three dice, no more than three rolls, and the option to set aside the dice you want to keep before rolling again.

1. Press Roll or drag the dice and release them over the tray. All three dice land and the combination appears below: 421, three aces, two aces and X, three of a kind, straight, nénette or a plain roll.
2. Tap a die to hold it. It stays marked and does not move on the next roll. Tap it again if you change your mind.
3. Roll again. Only the dice you have not held are thrown. A counter shows how many rolls you have left.
4. After the third roll, or as soon as you choose to stop, the combination is fixed. The page places it in the ranking from best to worst, so you know what has to be beaten.

The page does not hand out chips at fixed values, because every table uses its own scale. The most common one and its usual variations are explained below. If several of you are playing on one phone, each player takes a turn and writes the result down before passing it on.

421 rules: the charge, the discharge and the chips

Equipment and aim

You need three six-sided dice and a pot of chips, called jetons in French. Most written rules use 21 chips, although many boxed sets and bars play with 11. Two or more people can play. The winner is the first player to get rid of all their chips; in the bar version, whoever ends up holding the lot usually buys the next round.

Who starts and how many rolls

Everyone rolls one die and the player with the agreed result (highest or lowest, depending on the table) goes first. Play passes clockwise. The first player in each round has up to three rolls and may hold any dice between rolls. The number of rolls that player uses sets the limit for the round: stop after one and everyone else gets one roll; use two and nobody else may use more than two. Some tables let a player stop early by knocking on the table, a custom known as le bon; agree on it before you start.

Phase one: the charge

As long as there are chips in the pot, the combinations are compared at the end of each round. The player with the worst roll takes from the pot as many chips as the best combination of that round is worth. If someone throws 421, the player who came last takes the heaviest load. The charge ends when the pot is empty.

Phase two: the discharge

Once the pot is empty, chips move between players. At the end of each round, the player with the best combination gives the player with the worst as many chips as that combination is worth. The game ends as soon as one player has no chips left, and that player wins.

The nénette

The roll 2-2-1 is called the nénette and it is the lowest combination of all. Whoever throws it takes two chips, whatever the best combination of the round. Some tables punish it harder, which is where the French saying that everything beats the nénette comes from.

421 rankings from best to worst

The dice are not added up. Only the combination of the three counts, in this order. The chips column shows the most common scale; the variations are covered in the next section.

In French, two aces plus another die is called a fiche or an X pur (1-1-5 is a "pure five") and is worth the value of the third die. A three of a kind is a brelan, also known as a baraque or zanzi. When the values are equal, the two-aces combination beats the three of a kind, so 1-1-5 ranks above 5-5-5. Plain rolls are ranked by reading the dice from highest to lowest like a number: 6-4-1 beats 5-5-3, and the best of them is 6-6-5.

The chip scale and its variations

Almost everyone who plays 421 agrees on the order of the combinations; far fewer agree on what each one is worth. That is why this page does not impose a scale: it tells you the combination and leaves the payout to your table.

In a bar or with new players, it is worth running through the basics out loud: how many chips are in the pot, what 421 and the nénette are worth, and whether le bon is allowed.

421 probabilities, worked out

Three dice give 6 × 6 × 6 = 216 possible rolls, all equally likely. Counting how many of them produce each combination gives this table for a single roll.

A 421 turns up six times as often as three aces, because its three dice are all different and can fall in six orders (4-2-1, 4-1-2, 2-4-1 and so on), whereas 1-1-1 can only be made one way. Three aces is rarer yet ranks second: 421 owes its top spot to tradition, not to rarity.

With three rolls and held dice

These figures assume you hold each useful die as soon as it appears and reroll the rest. Chasing 421 over three rolls, you will get it a little more than once in every five turns.

Tips for playing 421 well

421 in French bars

421 is the classic French bar dice game. It is played at the counter of cafés, often on a felt-lined dice tray with a raised rim, and is commonly used to decide who pays for the next round. It is also played at home, on the beach and at pavement tables.

Because it has been passed on by word of mouth from bar to bar, each region, and sometimes each café, has its own details: the value of 421, the size of the pot or the penalty for the nénette. The game is related to zanzi or zanzibar, another French three-dice game built around three of a kind, and in some areas a three of a kind in 421 is still called a zanzi. French encyclopaedias describe it as a three-dice game in which players aim for combinations, first 4-2-1 and then three of a kind and straights, with the number of players making little difference.

Its vocabulary belongs to bar-counter French: the charge and the décharge, the nénette, the fiches and the jetons passed from hand to hand. There are many app versions today, and French shops sell dice trays designed for 421 and Yam's, the French cousin of Yahtzee.