Dice for the Game of the Goose

How to use these Goose dice

The page starts with two dice and shows the total under the tray, which is the number of spaces your piece moves. If your board or your household plays with one die, press Play with 1 die and each throw becomes a single die. You can switch back to two dice at any point, for instance to follow the Spanish habit of using one die from space 60 onwards.

1. Choose how many players there are. Turns follow the order red, yellow, green and blue and move on automatically after every throw, so nobody has to remember who is next.
2. Roll with the button or by dragging the dice. The result and the total stay on screen until the next throw.
3. On each colour's first throw, a message appears if the dice show 6 and 3 or 5 and 4. Under many rule sets those two throws send the piece straight to space 26 or space 53.
4. If a player lands on the inn, the well or the prison, skip their turn when it comes round. The page does not know where the pieces are on your board, so the squares are up to you.

Rules for the special spaces

The classic board is a spiral of 63 spaces that winds towards the centre. The first player to reach space 63, the goose garden, wins, and the piece has to land there exactly. Along the way some spaces help you and others hold you back. Their positions are almost identical in every country; the penalties are what change.

Two general rules complete the set. Most boards allow only one piece per space: if you land on an occupied space, the other piece goes to the space you came from, so the two swap places. And a special space only takes effect when your move ends on it, not when you pass over it.

Why the 6+3 and 5+4 rule exists

The geese sit every nine spaces in two series (5, 14, 23… and 9, 18, 27…). If a player threw 9 on the first turn and moved the same amount again on each goose, the piece would hop from goose to goose all the way to the end and win before anyone else had played. To prevent that, a first throw of 9 has a fixed destination: 6 and 3 goes to 26, 5 and 4 to 53. Many English boards have no goose on space 9, which is why they often leave this rule out.

One die or two?

Both are correct; it depends on the tradition and on the box. Early Italian, French and English boards were played with two dice, moving the total. That is also the rule that makes sense of 6+3 and 5+4, since a single die can never show 9.

In Spain both customs are common. Many modern sets come with one die, and plenty of families have always played that way. When two dice are used, the usual habit is to switch to one die from space 60, because hitting 63 exactly with two dice is awkward when fewer than six spaces remain. In Germany one die is also widely used, even though the traditional rules mention two.

The real difference is pace. Two dice move a piece 7 spaces per throw on average, so the game is short. One die averages 3.5, so a game takes roughly twice as many turns, which suits young children because they count fewer spaces each time.

The Goose game around Europe

The game spread across Europe from Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, and each country kept its own name and a few house rules. This table sums up the differences that cause the most arguments at the table.

In Brazil, ‘jogo da velha’ means noughts and crosses and has nothing to do with the goose game, which is worth knowing if you look up rules in Portuguese.

Dice odds in the Game of the Goose

Two dice give 36 possible combinations, and the totals do not come up equally often. This is the exact distribution, and it is what decides how often each space is hit:

The first throw

Starting from the beginning of the track, the first throw with two dice works out like this:

Adding the goose on 5 to the two nines, about one player in five (22.2%) gets a head start on the first throw. With a single die the only goose within reach is space 5, at 16.7%, and the rule for 9 never applies.

Landing exactly on 63

Because the finish must be exact, the end of the game is the slowest part. The table shows the chance of reaching 63 in a single throw, depending on how many spaces are left:

With two dice you cannot finish from one space away, and from two spaces only double one will do. That is the reasoning behind the Spanish custom of using one die from space 60: with a single die every distance from 1 to 6 has the same one-in-six chance.

Where the Game of the Goose comes from

Nobody knows exactly who invented it, but historians who have studied the surviving boards agree that it comes from Italy. The oldest known mention is in a fifteenth-century Italian sermon, attributed to the Dominican friar Gabriele da Barletta and published in 1480, which lists it among pastimes that distract from devotion.

The most repeated story is the Medici gift. According to the Sicilian writer Pietro Carrera, who told it in 1617 in a book about chess, Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, sent a Game of the Goose to Philip II of Spain. Francesco ruled from 1574 to 1587, so the gift must date from those years; the precise years quoted in some books (1575 or 1580) are not documented. Carrera was writing some forty years later and some historians treat his account with caution, but it remains the earliest source for the game reaching the Spanish court.

The early printed sheets, on the other hand, are well documented:

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the game was played for money, which is why boards marked the spaces that made you pay into the pot. It only became a children's game in the nineteenth century. The 63 spaces were not chosen at random either: at the time the age of 63 was known as the ‘grand climacteric’, the most dangerous year of a person's life, and scholars read the track as a picture of human life, with death waiting on space 58.

A great deal has been written about the Knights Templar or the Camino de Santiago being hidden in the board. These are popular theories, but no early document supports them.

Game of the Goose curiosities

• Thousands of themed versions are known. French collectors have catalogued more than ten thousand variants, including a game about the Dreyfus affair published in 1898.
• In England, John Jefferys published a geography game on the goose pattern in 1759 to teach the map of Europe.
• The oldest surviving English goose board is in Samuel Pepys's library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, pasted into an album of London prints put together around 1700.
• Early boards often start with a jester at the beginning and end with a feasting scene on space 63.
• The game is still sold and played in the Netherlands more than almost anywhere else.

Practical tips for the game