Farkle: six dice and an automatic scorer

How to use these Farkle dice

1. Roll all six dice. Press Roll, or pick them up with your finger or mouse and let go over the tray.
2. Set aside the scoring dice. Tap each die you want to keep: ones, fives, three of a kind or a six-dice combination. The page checks that what you set aside actually scores and adds it to your turn total.
3. Decide. Roll the remaining dice to build your total, or press Bank to add the turn total to your score.
4. Farkle. If a roll contains no scoring dice, the page tells you: you lose everything from that turn and play passes on.
5. Hot dice. If you manage to set aside all six, you get all six back and keep rolling without losing your turn total.
6. End of the game. The scoreboard tracks every player up to 10,000 points.

The page uses the most widespread scoring: a 1 is worth 100, a 5 is worth 50, three of a kind is worth 100 times the number (three 1s score 1,000), a 1-6 straight is worth 1,500 and three pairs are worth 1,500. If your family plays with a different table, the common variants are listed further down so you can adjust on paper.

Farkle rules

Farkle is a push-your-luck dice game for two or more players. It uses six ordinary six-sided dice, and the first player to reach 10,000 points wins, although plenty of groups agree on 5,000 for a shorter game.

Your turn

• Every turn starts by rolling all six dice.
• After each roll you must set aside at least one scoring die or combination. You may set aside more, but you do not have to take everything that scores.
• With the dice left over, you choose between rolling again and banking. Once you bank, the turn total goes on the score sheet and is safe.
• If a roll contains nothing that scores, you have farkled: the turn ends and you lose every point built up during it. Points banked in earlier turns are kept.

Combinations only count within one roll

Three of a kind must come up in a single throw. If you set aside a 5 on your first roll and then roll two more fives, you do not have three fives (500) but three single fives (150). Both the commercial rules and the classic rule books make this point.

Hot dice

If every die you have left scores and you set them all aside, you have hot dice: pick up all six again and keep adding to the same turn. There is no limit to how often this can happen. Some groups make the extra roll compulsory after hot dice; others let you bank.

Getting on the board

Many rule sets require a minimum before your first score counts. The commercial Patch Products edition asks for 500 points in a single turn; other versions ask for 1,000, and some groups require 300 or 350 every turn.

Final round

When someone reaches 10,000, every other player gets one last turn to beat that total. Highest score wins. In France, a common variant requires exactly 10,000.

Farkle scoring table and variants

The values for ones, fives and three of a kind are almost universal. Everything else changes a lot from table to table, so it is worth agreeing before you start.

Four, five and six of a kind

There is no agreement here. The three usual methods are:

Other combinations found in some rules

• Four of a kind plus a pair: 1,500 (Patch edition).
• Two triplets in the same roll: 2,500 (Patch) or 3,000.
• Short straight 1-2-3-4-5 or 2-3-4-5-6: 500 in some rules; others give 500 and 750.
• Six dice with nothing scoring: some households award 500 instead of calling it a Farkle.
• Penalty for three Farkles in a row: minus 500 or minus 1,000.

Farkle, Ten Thousand, Zilch: names and rules by country

Farkle is a folk game passed on by word of mouth, which is why it has so many names. In English it is Farkle, Ten Thousand, Zilch, Greed, Hot Dice or Zonk; in French, Dix mille or 10 000 (Zloutch in New Caledonia); in German, Zehntausend, Macke or Volle Lotte. In Spain and Latin America it usually goes by «10.000».

Farkle odds, calculated

These figures come from counting every possible outcome of the dice (6 to the power of the number of dice). They use the scoring on this page.

Chance of a Farkle by number of dice rolled

With six dice, 2.31% only holds if three pairs score. If your table does not count them, the risk of a Farkle with six dice rises to 3.09% (1,440 of 46,656 rolls). With five dice or fewer both tables agree, because the straight and three pairs need all six dice.

Special combinations with six dice

The first table is the one that shapes the game: with three dice you already fail more than one roll in four, and with two dice almost one in two.

When to bank: Farkle strategy in numbers

In 2017 the computer scientists Matthew Busche and Todd Neller (Gettysburg College) worked out optimal two-player Farkle strategy for the basic scoring of ones, fives and three of a kind. Their study gives simple rules you can use at the table.

Thresholds for the highest average score

Following this table gives an average of about 447 points per turn, and around 20.6% of turns end in a Farkle. With a more generous table (straights, three pairs, four of a kind) it pays to push a little further, because each roll has more ways to score.

Practical tips

History of Farkle

Farkle is a folk game with no known inventor, and its origins are poorly documented. What can be traced is its appearance in games books: it shows up as Ten Thousand in American collections from the 1980s and 1990s, and the German designer Reiner Knizia includes it in his book Dice Games Properly Explained (1999).

Stories circulate about a medieval origin or a nobleman called Albert Farkle, but there are no documents to back them up. Where the word «Farkle» comes from is not clear either.