Pig (Dice Game) Rules

Pig needs only a single six-sided die and produces one of the purest "push your luck" decisions in any game covered on this site: keep rolling and adding to your turn's running total, or stop and bank it — but roll a single 1 at any point before you stop, and your entire turn's total, no matter how big it's grown, disappears completely.

Playing a Turn

On your turn, roll the die repeatedly. Each roll of 2 through 6 adds that number to your turn's running total, and you may choose to roll again or stop and add the accumulated total to your overall score. Rolling a 1 at any point ends your turn immediately with zero added — everything you'd built up that turn is lost, though your score from previous turns stays completely safe.

Winning

Play continues, turn by turn, until one player's overall banked score reaches an agreed target (100 is the standard). There's no direct interaction between players beyond taking turns and racing toward that shared target — nothing you roll affects an opponent's dice or score directly.

The Math Behind "When to Stop"

Pig has been studied seriously enough as a decision problem that its optimal strategy is mathematically known rather than just a matter of gut feeling: the generally accepted best simple strategy is to keep rolling until your turn's running total reaches roughly 20, then bank it regardless of what you've rolled so far, adjusting slightly based on how close you or your opponent are to the winning target. This makes Pig a genuinely popular tool in probability and decision- theory classrooms specifically because its rules are simple enough to explain in a sentence, while its optimal play requires real mathematical reasoning to actually derive rather than just intuit.

Why a Single Bad Roll Costs So Much

The 1-in-6 chance of rolling a 1 on any single roll doesn't sound severe in isolation, but it compounds against you the longer you keep rolling in a single turn — the actual risk of losing your whole turn's total by the time you've rolled five or six times in a row is considerably higher than most players intuitively expect, which is exactly the tension the game is built around: every additional roll adds a modest expected gain but carries a real, growing chance of losing everything banked that turn.

Where Pig Came From

Pig is a folk dice game of genuinely unknown original inventor, first written down formally by magician and gambling expert John Scarne in his 1945 book Scarne on Dice — Scarne documented it as an already-existing traditional game rather than claiming to have invented it himself, which is why its true origin predates that publication by an unknown and likely much longer stretch. It's generally considered the direct ancestor of several later commercial "push your luck" dice games that added more elaborate scoring and themed pieces on top of the same fundamental accumulate-or- lose-it-all mechanic.

Variants Worth Knowing

"Pig for two dice" plays with two dice at once instead of one, where rolling a single 1 on either die still busts the turn, but rolling double 1s ("snake eyes") resets your ENTIRE overall score to zero, not just that turn's total — a much harsher penalty that changes optimal strategy significantly. A team or multiplayer variant simply extends the same turn-based structure to more players racing toward the same target score, with no other rules changes needed.

The Arguments This Game Actually Produces

The most common real dispute is what target score a group is actually playing to, since 50 and 100 are both common defaults and produce noticeably different game lengths and optimal stopping points — agreeing on the target before the first roll avoids confusion partway through. A second common friction point is whether a player can deliberately choose to stop mid-roll sequence after announcing they're rolling again (most rules require committing to "roll again" before seeing the result, not backing out after the die is already in hand).

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

Does rolling a 1 on your very first roll of a turn cost you anything beyond that turn's (nonexistent) total? No — your overall banked score from previous turns is completely unaffected; only the current turn's accumulated total is lost.

Can you keep rolling after reaching the winning target mid-turn, or does the game end immediately? Standard rules end the game the instant a player's banked total reaches the target, which typically only happens once they choose to stop and bank — reaching the target mid-roll- sequence (before deciding to stop) usually still requires banking to trigger the win.

Is there a maximum number of rolls allowed in a single turn? No — a player can roll as many times as they're willing to risk in a single turn, with no upper limit beyond the growing chance of busting.