Pig
One die. On your turn you roll it as often as you like and the faces add up into a turn total. Every face but the 1 adds to it. Roll a 1 and the turn total is gone and you score nothing that turn. Hold instead and the turn total is added to your score, and the turn passes. The first player to reach a hundred wins, the moment they reach it.
Your turn
- Roll the die. A two, three, four, five or six is added to your turn total, and you may roll again.
- A 1 ends your turn at once and the turn total is worth nothing. Your score does not change.
- Hold and the turn total is added to your score. The turn passes to the next player.
- Holding on nothing is allowed. It scores nothing and passes the turn, which is occasionally what you want.
- There is no limit on how many times you may roll in one turn, only on your nerve.
How a game ends
- The first player to reach a hundred wins, and the match stops there. Nobody else gets a reply.
- THE WIN ARRIVES ON THE ROLL. If a roll takes your score plus your turn total to a hundred you have won on that roll, and you are not asked to hold it. There is nothing left to tap.
- Because of that, holding is never the move that wins a match. A roll always gets there first.
- A winning score is not rounded down. Reach a hundred and two and you finish on a hundred and two, and the players behind you are placed in score order.
- A player who resigns is out. At two players the other one wins; at three or four the match carries on without them and they are placed last.
- The move deadline you pick when the game is made is a deadline for each ROLL, not for a whole turn, so pick a short one: a turn is several rolls and a match is many turns.
Who goes first, and what that is worth
- The seed decides who moves first, the same way it decides every roll.
- Moving first is worth something in this game, and it is worth saying out loud: under perfect play the first player wins about fifty-three times in a hundred.
- That is the game as it has always been played, not something this site added. The alternative, letting everybody have the same number of turns, was tried and measured here and it moves the advantage to the LAST player instead, by rather more.
- So the first move is dealt rather than chosen, and the seed is published when the match ends so you can check that it was.
Worth knowing before you start
- Holding at about twenty is the rule of thumb, and it is a good one: roll until the turn total reaches twenty, then hold.
- It stops being the right answer when you are behind near the end. A player who needs thirty should keep rolling for thirty, because holding on twenty loses just as surely as rolling a 1.
- On ninety-eight or ninety-nine, roll. Five faces out of six win outright and holding wins nothing at all.
- Every roll in the game comes from the seed, which is published when the match ends, so nobody can see a roll coming and anybody can check every one of them afterwards.
- The bot plays at one of three strengths, drawn per match from the seed: one holds at ten, one holds at twenty, and one plays from a solved table of the whole game. Against two or three other players that table is read against whoever is leading, which is an approximation rather than perfect play.
Pig is a traditional folk dice game and belongs to nobody. It is played here exactly as it is published, including the first player's advantage, which is recorded above rather than quietly adjusted away. Every roll comes from the seed and the seed is published when the match ends, so the whole match can be replayed from the log and checked.
Pig terms
- The turn total
- What you have rolled so far this turn and have not kept yet. A 1 takes all of it. It is the big number on its own, and it is the only thing at risk.
- Your score
- What you have kept, over every turn. It is the number beside your name, and nothing can take it away.
- To hold
- To stop rolling and add the turn total to your score. It ends your turn.
- The target
- A hundred. The first player to reach it wins immediately, mid-turn included.