Shut the Box online with two dice

How to play on this page

1. Roll. Press Roll, or pick up the dice with your finger or mouse and drop them in the tray. All nine tiles start open.
2. Shut tiles. Tap open tiles that add up exactly to the roll. With an 8 you can shut the 8 on its own, the 7 and 1, the 6 and 2, the 5 and 3, the 5, 2 and 1, or the 4, 3 and 1. The page will not let you confirm a selection that does not match the dice.
3. Roll again. As long as you can shut something, you keep rolling. Once the open tiles add up to 6 or less, the page offers you the option of rolling a single die.
4. End of the game. If no combination of open tiles matches the roll, the game is over. Your score is the total of the tiles still open, and lower is better.
5. Shutting the box. Close all nine tiles and you have shut the box: a score of 0, the best result possible.

Press New game to start again. With several players, each person plays a full turn in order and you keep the scores on paper.

Shut the Box rules

Shut the Box is a dice game for one player or a group, and a long-standing pub game in Britain. It is played with a wooden box holding a row of hinged or sliding tiles numbered 1 to 9 and two ordinary six-sided dice. There is no single official rulebook: manufacturers and pubs all have their own details, but the core is always the same.

A turn

• At the start of your turn every tile is open, showing its number.
• Roll both dice and add them up.
• Shut one or more open tiles whose numbers add up exactly to that total. You must use the whole total, with nothing left over.
• Keep rolling and shutting until you throw a total you cannot cover with the tiles that remain.

Scoring

When you are stuck, add up the numbers on the open tiles. If the 2, 3 and 5 are still up, you score 10. The lowest score wins. A player who shuts all nine tiles calls “Shut the box” and, under most house rules, wins the round outright.

The one-die rule

Towards the end of a turn the tiles left are low, and two dice struggle to make small totals (they can never make 1). That is why almost every version lets you roll a single die at some point. There are two common ways of deciding when:

• When the open tiles total 6 or less. This is the rule used on this page, and a common version in Germany.
• When the 7, 8 and 9 are all shut. This is the version most often quoted in British pub rules.

In practice the difference is small. With perfect play the chance of shutting the box is the same under both (see the odds table below). Just agree which one you are using before you start.

Variants: more tiles, other scoring and multi-round games

10-tile and 12-tile boxes

As well as the classic 1 to 9 box, sets are sold with tiles 1 to 10 and 1 to 12. The rules are the same but the game gets much harder: on a 12-tile board there are 78 points to close, and the 10, 11 and 12 can only go down on high totals, which are the least likely rolls. On 12-tile boxes you normally keep rolling two dice while any tile above 6 is open.

Ways of scoring

Digital scoring punishes leaving several tiles up: a lone 9 scores 9, but the 1 and 2 together score 12 and the 1, 2 and 3 score 123. Under this system it pays to leave as few tiles standing as possible, even if that means more points on paper.

Multi-round games

Other house rules

Some players only allow you to shut the tile matching the total or the two tiles matching each die (a 6 and a 3 lets you shut the 9, or the 6 and the 3, but not the 8 and 1). It is a simpler version that works well with young children. Others limit you to two tiles per roll.

Two-dice totals and tile combinations

Two six-sided dice give 36 equally likely results. The most common total is 7, and the extremes, 2 and 12, can only come up one way. The last column shows how many different ways there are to shut that total on a full 1 to 9 board.

Two practical points follow. Your first roll can never end the game: every total from 2 to 9 has its own tile, and 10, 11 and 12 can be shut with the 9 plus the 1, 2 or 3. And the 9 on its own needs a roll of 9 or more, which comes up only 10 times in 36, so the longer it stays open the more likely it is to be stranded.

The odds of shutting the box

We worked out in Python, by going through every possible board position, the chance of shutting the box when you always pick the best move. The figures for the classic 1 to 9 game match published mathematical analyses of the game.

Put simply: even without a single mistake, you shut a nine-tile box about once in every ten games. On a 12-tile board it is less than once in two hundred.

How scores are spread

This table shows how often a game on the 1 to 9 board finishes with each score, using this page’s rule and playing to keep the score as low as possible.

After 0, the most common final score is 9 (5.9% of games), followed by 8 and 10. If you finish on 5 or less, you have beaten roughly three games in four.

What your first move is worth

The best possible start is a 9 used to shut the 9. A poor choice costs a lot: opening with a 9 and shutting the 2, 3 and 4 instead of the 9 drops your chance from 14.50% to 2.56%, and shutting 1, 2 and 3 with an opening 6 drops it from 9.00% to 1.51%.

Basic strategy

Shut the Box is mostly luck, but your choices make a real difference to your average score. These are the points that come out of the calculation, roughly in order of importance.

1. Shut the high numbers first. The 7, 8 and 9 can only go down on high rolls or in very few combinations, and they cost the most if they stay up. When you have a choice, take the option that shuts the highest tile.
2. Shut as few tiles as possible per roll. With a 9 it is better to shut the 9 than the 2, 3 and 4. Low tiles are what you use to make up totals later on; spend them early and you run out of pieces to combine.
3. Keep the 1, 2 and 3. They are the most flexible tiles: they fit into lots of totals and, at the end, they are easy to finish with a single die.
4. Take the single die whenever it is offered. In every position with 6 or less left, one die gives you better chances than two. With 1, 2 and 3 open, the chance of shutting the box is 33.33% with one die against 18.98% with two; with 1 and 2 open it is 22.22% against 6.02%.
5. On an early 10, 11 or 12, use the 9. The calculation recommends 9 and 1 for a 10, 9 and 2 for an 11, and 9 and 3 for a 12.

How simple rules of thumb perform

The “fewest tiles, highest first” rule comes very close to perfect play and needs no thought at the table. The opposite instinct, clearing lots of small tiles at once, more than doubles your average score.

If you are playing digital scoring, the priority shifts slightly: leaving few tiles open matters more than leaving few points, because each extra tile adds a digit.

History and names

Where Shut the Box comes from is not documented. Tradition places it in northern France, in Normandy or the Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey), where sailors and fishermen are said to have played it for small stakes. You will often read that it goes back to the 12th century, but no document supports that.

What is on record is its arrival in English pubs. According to Timothy Finn’s Pub Games of England, a Mr “Chalky” Towbridge brought it from the Channel Islands to the south of England in 1958, and by the 1960s there is written evidence of it being played in pubs, Manchester among them. It has been a familiar pub and family game in Britain ever since.

In the United States it was the basis of the TV quiz show High Rollers, hosted by Alex Trebek on NBC in 1974 to 1976 and 1978 to 1980, and by Wink Martindale in 1987 and 1988. Contestants threw giant dice to knock the numbers 1 to 9 off a board.

Names around Europe

• English: Shut the Box; commercial versions have been sold under other names, such as Canoga.
• German: Shut the Box, Klappenspiel or Klappbrett.
• French: Shut the box or ferme la boîte, with the tiles called volets or clapets.
• Spanish: cierra la caja.
• Italian and Portuguese: the English name is the one most used.

The boxes are a common teaching aid in schools, because every roll means splitting a number into parts. There are also four-player and six-player editions with a row of tiles for each person.