Farkle Rules

Farkle is played with six ordinary dice and nothing else, which is exactly why it has spread under a dozen different names — Zilch, Greed, Squelch, Ten Thousand — with a dozen slightly different scoring tables, none of them backed by a single publisher's rulebook. There's no board, no cards, no fixed player count; you just need dice, a flat surface, and agreement, before the first roll, on which version of the scoring table you're using.

Rolling and scoring a turn

On your turn, you roll all six dice at once. After the roll, you must set aside at least one scoring die or combination, then choose to either bank your points and end your turn, or roll the remaining (non-set-aside) dice again to try to add more. The moment a roll produces no scoring dice or combinations at all, your turn ends immediately and you lose every point banked during that turn — that's a "Farkle" (or a "zilch," depending on the table), and it's the risk that drives every decision in the game.

The single dice and three-of-a-kind values almost everyone agrees on

These scores are close to universal across the versions of Farkle in circulation:

• A single 1 scores 100 points.
• A single 5 scores 50 points.
• Three of a kind scores the die's face value ×100 — three 2s = 200, three 3s = 300, three 4s = 400, three 5s = 500, three 6s = 600 — except three 1s, which score 1,000 rather than 100.
• Any 1s or 5s left over after a three-of-a-kind is claimed still score individually at the single-die rate above.

Where "official" rules stop agreeing

Past three-of-a-kind, the versions genuinely diverge, and there is no single authority to appeal to — this is worth stating plainly rather than picking one table and presenting it as the only real answer:

• Four, five and six of a kind. Most tables double the three-of-a-kind value for four of a kind and double it again for five, so four 4s is commonly 800 and five 4s is 1,600 — but a significant minority of tables simply score every extra matching die as another full three-of-a-kind value stacked on top (four 4s = 400 + 400 = 800 either way in that case, but the two methods diverge sharply for four or five 1s, where doubling gives 2,000/4,000 and stacking gives 1,000+1,000/1,000+1,000+1,000). Six of a kind is even less standardized — some tables treat it as an automatic 3,000, others as double the five-of-a-kind figure.
• A straight (one through six). Very commonly worth 1,500, though some tables score it at 1,000 or 2,000, and a few require the straight to be rolled in a single throw of all six dice rather than assembled across a turn.
• Three pairs. Common values are 750, 1,000 or 1,500 depending on the table, and some rulesets don't recognize three pairs as a scoring combination at all.
• Two triplets in one roll. Some tables award a large bonus (commonly 2,500) for rolling two different three-of-a-kinds at once; many simply score them as two separate three-of-a-kinds added together.

None of these is more "correct" than another — they're genuinely different house standards that grew up around the same core dice mechanic. The only fix that actually prevents an argument is agreeing on the scoring table out loud before the first roll, ideally by writing the agreed values down if the group has players from different regions or families.

Hot dice: banking or pushing your luck

If every one of your six dice scores across one or more rolls in the same turn — either directly or because you kept setting scoring dice aside until none were left — you get "hot dice": you pick all six back up and roll them again, adding to the same turn's total rather than starting over. This is where Farkle's real tension lives: hot dice is a chance to build a genuinely large score in one turn, but every additional roll still carries full Farkle risk, and a player who gets greedy after hitting hot dice twice in a row can lose an enormous banked total in a single bad roll.

Getting on the board, and getting to 10,000

Most tables require a minimum single-turn score — commonly 500, sometimes 1,000 — before a player's points count toward their running total at all; a turn that banks less than that minimum scores zero for the whole turn even if no Farkle occurred. The target for winning is almost always 10,000 points, tracked on a running scoresheet across many turns per player.

The final round once someone hits target

The moment any player's total reaches the target score, the game does not end immediately — every other player still gets exactly one more turn, giving them a last chance to overtake the leader. Whoever has the highest score once everyone has had that final turn wins outright, which means the player who first crosses 10,000 is not guaranteed to win if their total is beatable and a later player gets hot dice on their closing turn.

Basic strategy: how many dice is too many to risk

The core decision every turn is how many dice to leave in play versus how many points to lock in. As a rough guide, rolling two dice back into play after banking the rest carries meaningfully higher Farkle risk than rolling four or five, simply because fewer dice means fewer chances for any of them to land on a 1, a 5, or a matching combination — a common beginner mistake is setting aside every scoring die except one or two and rerolling those few, when the odds of that small a reroll actually scoring again are considerably worse than they look. Conversely, refusing to ever bank and always chasing hot dice is just as costly in the long run, since a single bad six-dice roll erases an entire turn's progress regardless of how large it had grown. Experienced players generally bank once a turn's total gets large relative to how many dice are still live, rather than chasing a fixed target score every single turn.

Team and two-player variants

Farkle scales down cleanly to two players, where the turn-by-turn tension is sharper because every point your opponent banks is a point you now need to beat rather than just outscore over a crowd. Some larger groups play a partnership variant where two players share one running total and alternate turns, which changes the calculus around banking — a partner who's about to go bust on a risky reroll is gambling with shared points, not just their own, and tables that play this way generally expect more conservative banking than the solo version rewards.

Farkle's many names and its folk-game history

Farkle belongs to a family of "6,000/10,000/Zilch"-style dice games with no traceable single inventor and no fixed publication date — it's a genuine folk game, passed table to table and regionally renamed, closer in lineage to games like Cheerio and Greed than to anything with a patent or a rulebook first edition. "Farkle" as a specific brand name was trademarked much later by commercial dice-set manufacturers, but the underlying dice game long predates any of those products, which is exactly why the scoring table above splits into "everyone agrees" and "everyone disagrees" — a game with no single canonical source naturally accumulates regional variants the way spoken language accumulates dialects.

The arguments this game actually produces

Beyond the scoring-table disagreements already covered above, the most common live dispute is whether a player can choose to set aside fewer scoring dice than they rolled, deliberately leaving some behind to reroll for a bigger combination — most tables allow this as long as at least one scoring die or combination is set aside from each roll, but it needs to be one of the things agreed before play starts. See the full dispute breakdown for the settled answer, the scoring deep-dive for a complete worked scoring table, and a printable scoresheet for tracking a full game to 10,000. If your group plays with a mix of dice and a phone timer instead of a physical set, LuckPicker can also handle the dice-rolling itself when a set isn't at hand.

Questions that come up mid-turn

If I roll and none of the dice score, but I haven't banked anything yet this turn, do I lose points from a previous turn? No — a Farkle only wipes out points accumulated during that turn. Anything already banked to your running total from earlier turns is safe regardless of how badly a later turn goes.

Can I stop rolling and bank points even if I haven't used every die? Yes, as long as you've set aside at least one scoring die or combination from your most recent roll — you're never required to keep rolling the remaining dice, and banking early with unused dice still on the table is a normal, common, and often correct choice once the risk of a Farkle outweighs the upside.

Does a player have to keep playing until the final round if they're far behind? Yes — every player still in the game takes their turn in the closing round regardless of how unlikely they are to overtake the leader, since a hot-dice run is genuinely capable of closing a large gap in one turn.

Is it legal to set aside a scoring combination and then immediately bank without rolling the rest at all? Yes, on the very first roll of a turn just as on any later one — banking after a single roll is a normal, cautious line, especially once your running total is already close to the target and you'd rather lock in a modest gain than risk it on a reroll.