Ship, Captain, and Crew Rules

Ship, Captain, and Crew forces a strict order onto its dice before any score counts at all: you need a 6 first, then a 5, then a 4 — rolling all three eventually isn't enough if you get them in the wrong sequence relative to when you set each one aside, which is what separates this from a simple "roll for the highest total" dice game.

Playing a Turn

Each player rolls five dice up to three times total per turn. On the first roll, you must set aside any 6 you rolled (the "Ship") before you can keep anything else; a second roll only lets you progress toward the "Captain" (a 5) if the Ship is already secured, and a third roll only counts toward the "Crew" (a 4) if both Ship and Captain are already set aside. In other words, you can't bank a 5 for later credit before you've actually locked in your 6, even if you rolled a 5 and a 6 together on the very first throw — well, in this specific case both would qualify to be set aside together since they arrived on the same roll, but a 5 rolled with no 6 present must be re-rolled, not saved for later.

Scoring

If you successfully secure a 6, 5, and 4 across your three allowed rolls, the two remaining dice — whatever they show — are added together as your "cargo," and that sum is your score for the turn. Fail to complete the full 6-5-4 sequence within three rolls, and the turn scores zero regardless of how close you got or how many rolls you used.

Why Order (Not Just Presence) Matters

The single biggest thing new players misunderstand is assuming that rolling a 6, 5, and 4 anywhere across three rolls is automatically enough — it isn't, if a 5 shows up on a roll before a 6 has already been secured, that 5 doesn't count and has to be re-rolled along with everything else not yet locked in. This sequencing requirement is what makes the game genuinely harder than it first appears, since a strong-looking early roll can still fail completely if the numbers didn't arrive in the right order relative to what's already banked.

Multiplayer Scoring

Every player takes their own full three-roll turn independently, and after everyone's gone, whoever banked the highest cargo total (having actually completed the full 6-5-4 sequence) wins the round. Ties for highest cargo are common with only two dice deciding the score, and most tables settle it by having just the tied players roll one more full turn against each other rather than splitting the win.

A Genuinely Old Bar-Dice Game With Many Names

Ship, Captain, and Crew has been documented under a wide range of different names depending on region and era — Ship of Fools, 6-5-4, Mariner, and Battleship among them — with its earliest solid documented appearance again coming from John Scarne's 1945 compendium Scarne on Dice, where a closely related four-part version ("Ship, Captain, Mate, and Crew") is described. It's traditionally been a common feature of bar and pub dice sets, especially in veterans' clubs and military bars, which is likely a big part of why it spread under so many different regional names rather than settling on one standardized title the way a commercially published game typically would.

Variants Worth Knowing

A four-die version drops the cargo scoring entirely and simply tracks who can complete the 6-5-4 sequence in the fewest rolls, turning it into a speed contest rather than a points contest. Some bar traditions attach a wagering stake to each round (commonly a round of drinks) rather than tracking cumulative points across multiple rounds at all, which changes the social stakes of a single round considerably without changing any of the underlying dice mechanics.

The Arguments This Game Actually Produces

The most common dispute is exactly which dice can be set aside together on a single roll when multiple qualifying numbers appear simultaneously — a roll showing a 6, 5, and 4 all at once on the very first throw legitimately locks all three in together, since the sequence requirement is about not banking a later number before an earlier one is secured, not about spacing rolls apart in time. A second common argument is whether re-rolled dice that already show a "wasted" qualifying number (a 5 rolled before the 6 was secured) have to be physically re-rolled or can simply be left as-is if they'd still qualify on a later roll — standard rules require an actual re-roll of any die not yet legitimately locked in.

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

If you roll a 6 on your first roll but nothing else useful, do you have to keep re-rolling all four remaining dice? Yes — every die not yet locked in as part of the valid sequence gets re-rolled on your next attempt.

Does the cargo score include dice that showed a 6, 5, or 4 but weren't needed for the sequence (a duplicate)? Yes — only the two dice actually used to complete Ship, Captain, and Crew are removed from cargo scoring; any duplicate high-value dice not needed for the sequence count normally as cargo.

What happens if you complete the sequence on your very first roll with no rolls left to spare? Nothing special beyond scoring immediately — completing the sequence early doesn't add any bonus, it simply means your two remaining dice from that same first roll become your cargo score directly.