Dice Games

A cup, a handful of dice, and nothing else to carry — that's the entire appeal of this family, and it's also why the games inside it are more different from each other than they look from the outside. Two dice games can share the exact same six-sided cubes and still feel nothing alike at the table: one lives or dies on a single roll, another asks you to decide when to stop pushing your luck, and a third is really a social game that happens to use dice as the excuse to pass something around a circle. This hub sorts the dice games here by which of those it actually is, rather than by how many dice each one uses — the actual setup and scoring for each game are saved for that game's own page.

The press-your-luck scoring games

Yahtzee-style dice, Farkle and Threes share the mechanic that defines this whole sub-family: you roll, set aside the dice you want to keep, and decide whether to re-roll the rest for a better result or bank what you've got. That decision — push again or stop — is the actual game, more than the dice themselves. Farkle raises the stakes highest of the three, since a bad re-roll can zero out an entire turn's accumulated score in one unlucky throw, which makes it the tensest of the group. Yahtzee-style scoring instead asks you to fill a fixed scorecard of categories across the whole game, so a single bad roll costs you one category rather than the whole turn, which softens the swings considerably and rewards planning several turns ahead for which category you're setting up to fill. Threes is the leanest of the three — a smaller scoring table and a shorter game overall — and works as the faster on-ramp for a table that wants the press-your-luck feeling without Yahtzee's full scorecard or Farkle's steepest risk.

Fixed-target wagering games with real casino roots

Craps and Cee-lo both descend directly from gambling dice games, and it shows in how they're structured: a shooter rolls against a fixed target or against the other players' own rolls, rather than accumulating a score across many turns. Craps in particular carries genuine complexity once side bets enter the picture, even though the core "roll to make your point" loop is simple to explain in a minute. Cee-lo is the faster, more compact of the two — three dice, a fixed hierarchy of winning and losing combinations, and a round that resolves in well under a minute — making it the better choice for a table that wants the wagering feel without Craps' full betting layout.

Pocket and instant games worth carrying in a bag

Tenzi, Ship, Captain, and Crew and Pig are built to be genuinely instant — no scorecard, no chips, sometimes no paper at all. Tenzi is a simultaneous speed game where every player races to get all ten of their own dice showing the same number, which makes it the loudest and fastest of the three. Ship, Captain, and Crew asks players to roll in a fixed sequence toward a specific combination (a six for the ship, a five for the captain, a four for the crew, then the highest remaining pair as cargo), which gives it more structure than Tenzi's free-for-all without needing anything beyond five dice. Pig strips things down even further — one die, a running total, and a single decision each turn about whether to keep rolling or bank your points — which makes it the single fastest game to teach anyone on this entire hub.

Social bluffing and passing games

Liar's Dice, Left Center Right (LCR), Bunco and Dreidel all lean toward the social side of this family — the dice matter, but reading the other players matters just as much or more. Liar's Dice is a genuine bluffing game, where players make and challenge claims about the dice hidden under everyone's own cup, closer in spirit to poker than to any other game on this hub. LCR is almost pure chance dressed up as a passing ritual — chips move around the table based on rolled letters until one player holds everything — which makes it one of the least strategically demanding games here but also one of the easiest to run with a group that's never played a structured game together before. Bunco moves players between tables in rounds, scoring specific combinations against a target number that changes each round, and works best with a genuinely large group split across several tables at once rather than one table playing in isolation. Dreidel carries real cultural and ritual weight beyond its mechanics, with a simple four-symbol spinning top deciding whether a player adds to, takes from, or leaves alone a shared pot.

How much luck is actually in each family

Dice games get accused of being "pure luck" more than they deserve, but the four families here sit at real different points on that spectrum. The press-your-luck scoring games have the most genuine decision-making of the group, since when to stop rolling is a real choice with real risk attached, and a strategic player who manages that risk well will out-score a reckless one over many games even though any single roll is uncontrollable. The casino-rooted wagering games are the most explicitly chance-driven — Craps' side bets aside, the core mechanic really is "will this roll go your way," and that's honest about what it is rather than a flaw. The pocket and instant games mostly reward speed and simple probability awareness (Ship, Captain, and Crew rewards knowing which combination is actually hardest to roll) more than deep strategy. The social games vary the most: Liar's Dice has real skill in reading opponents and managing your own bluffs, while LCR has essentially none at all, which is exactly why LCR works for a table that specifically wants a low-stakes, no-skill-gap game everyone can win.

Why dice travel better than almost anything else on this site

A deck of cards needs a flat surface and enough space to fan a hand; most board games need a literal board. Dice need a cup, a flat few inches of table, and nothing else — several of the games on this hub (Pig, Ship Captain and Crew, Tenzi) don't even need a scorepad if the group is willing to count out loud. That portability is part of why dice games show up so often as the answer on the best games under 15 minutes and road trip pick lists elsewhere on this site — when space and setup time are the actual constraint, a dice game usually beats a card game or a board game outright.

What's actually in the cup

Every game on this hub uses standard six-sided dice — no specialty dice, no expansion sets to track down — but the number in play varies more than a newcomer might expect, and that number alone changes how a game feels before a single rule is applied. Pig uses exactly one die and turns that scarcity into the entire tension of the game, since one die means a single bad roll can only end your turn, never wipe out a running total the way a bad roll among several dice can. Yahtzee- style dice and Farkle both use six, which is enough dice for genuinely varied combinations to appear across a roll without the count becoming hard to track at a glance. Craps uses two, the smallest set that can still produce the "point" mechanic the whole game is built around. Bunco splits three dice per player across several small tables running the same round simultaneously, which is part of why it scales to a much larger group than any other game on this hub without losing pace — nobody is waiting on a single shared set of dice to finish making the rounds.

Reading versus writing — how each game tracks a score

Whether a game needs a scorepad at all is a real practical difference, not a small one. Yahtzee- style dice and Bunco both require a written scorecard tracking multiple categories or rounds, so neither one works well without paper and a pen already on the table. Farkle and Threes usually get tracked on a single running tally per player, which is lighter but still needs something to write on. Pig, Ship Captain and Crew, Tenzi, Craps, Cee-lo, LCR and Dreidel can all be played with nothing written down at all — the "score" is either instantly visible (who's out of chips in LCR, whose dice all match in Tenzi) or small enough to hold in your head for one round (Cee-lo, Ship Captain and Crew). That's worth checking before you commit to a game on a train, in a car, or anywhere a flat writing surface genuinely isn't available.

How to actually choose

If your table wants a genuine strategic decision inside a short game, start with Farkle or Yahtzee-style dice — both reward planning turns ahead rather than just hoping for good numbers, and both are common enough sources of scoring disagreement that they each have their own page under Settle an Argument. If you want something that resolves in under a minute per round and needs almost no explanation, Pig or Tenzi teach themselves on the first roll. If the table is genuinely large and you want everyone playing at once rather than watching one group play, Bunco or LCR are built for exactly that.

For the full catalogue sorted by every category rather than just this one, see Browse Games by Type. And if the actual question is what to play tonight rather than which dice game specifically, What Should We Play? sorts by player count, time and mood across every family this site covers, not just this one.