Printable Threes (Dice Game) Score Sheet

Threes flips the usual dice-game instinct on its head twice over: threes themselves score as zero (a good thing to roll), and the lowest total at the end of a round wins, not the highest. A sheet for this game only needs to get those two reversals right — everything else is straightforward addition.

The core scoring rule

Five dice are rolled and set aside gradually (at least one die must be kept aside each turn, and once set aside a die is locked in for the round), with each die counting its face value toward that player's round total except a 3, which counts as zero. A round's score is simply the sum of all five dice once every one of them has been set aside, with 3s contributing nothing — which means a hand that rolls several 3s can post a surprisingly low, favorable total.

Why lower is better, and what that means for the sheet

Once every player has finished a round, whoever has the lowest total wins that round. A sheet tracking Threes across several rounds should be read the same way a Hearts or Kings-in-the-Corner sheet is — scanning for the minimum, not the maximum — since a player instinctively looking for the "biggest number wins" pattern from most other dice games will misread the standings.

Shooting the moon: five 6s

Rolling all five dice as 6s ("shooting the moon" in this game's terminology, unrelated to the Hearts rule of the same name) is an instant win for that round regardless of what anyone else rolls or has set aside so far — worth a distinct marker on the sheet rather than just a very high number, since a plain total of 30 could otherwise be mistaken for a data-entry error rather than the specific automatic-win combination it actually is.

Tracking a full session

Most groups play several rounds and track a running cumulative total per player, with the overall session winner being whoever has the lowest cumulative total once the agreed number of rounds is finished — the same lower-is-better logic applied round after round rather than resetting.

The gambling variant, if a table uses it

Some groups play Threes for stakes: everyone antes into a pot each round, and the lowest total takes it, with ties requiring a re-ante and re-roll among the tied players only. This turns the sheet from a running-score tracker into a pot ledger similar to Cee-lo's, and it's worth a clear note on which version — points or pot — a given session is using.

Choosing which dice to set aside

Because only one die is required to be set aside per turn but a player may choose to bank more, part of the game's actual decision-making is weighing a currently low roll against the risk of re-rolling remaining dice into something worse. None of this affects how the sheet is filled in — only the final five-dice total per round matters for scoring — but it's worth understanding why two players who finish with the same total might have taken very different paths to it, since the sheet only records outcomes, not the decisions behind them.

How many dice must be set aside per turn, and typical stake conventions, are both covered on the full Threes (Dice Game) rules page. Worked round totals, including a shot-the-moon example, are on the scoring deep-dive.

Does a 3 ever count against a player instead of for zero? No — under the standard rules, a 3 always scores exactly zero toward that die's contribution to the round total; there's no house variant in common use that flips this to a penalty, which is what makes rolling several 3s a genuinely good outcome rather than a wasted turn.

If two players tie for the lowest total in a round, who wins? Most groups treat a tie as a shared win for scoring-only play (no round winner declared, running totals unaffected for both), while gambling variants specifically require a re-roll between just the tied players to settle who actually takes the pot.

Threes belongs to the same Dice Games category hub as Farkle, Bunco, and this site's other dice games, and the Universal Scorekeeper handles a multi-round running total (remembering that lower is better here) if you'd rather not track it on paper.