Six dice, and one question asked over and over: bank what you have, or roll the rest? Every extra roll is worth about a hundred points and carries a chance of losing everything on the table.
- 2.31 % of six-dice rolls score nothing at all
- 601 points is what a perfectly played turn is worth
- 300 is the right banking point with exactly two dice — and no others
- 10,000 to win, then one last turn for everybody else
What scores in Farkle?
| Each 1 | 100 |
| Each 5 | 50 |
| Three of a kind | 100 × the face — three 4s are 400 |
| Three 1s | 1,000 |
| Four / five / six of a kind | 1,000 / 2,000 / 3,000 |
| Straight 1-6 · three pairs | 1,500 each |
| Two triplets | 2,500 |
Nothing else scores on its own: a lone 2, 3, 4 or 6 is dead weight. The upper half of that table is the part that varies from kitchen to kitchen — this page fixes one set and the Farkle score sheet prints the same one.
How do you play Farkle?
- Roll six dice.
- Set aside at least one die that scores. You choose which — and that choice matters more than it looks.
- Bank, or roll what is left. Banking adds your turn total to your score and ends the turn.
- Roll nothing that scores and you farkle — the whole turn is gone, including everything set aside.
- Set aside all six and you roll all six again, keeping the total. There is no limit on how far one turn can run.
First past 10,000 wins, and everyone else gets one last turn to overtake.
When should you bank in Farkle?
Everybody says "bank at 300". The decision has only two inputs — how many dice are left and how much is riding on the turn — so it can be solved completely rather than argued about.
What are the odds of a farkle?
The risk roughly doubles with each die you give up. What is not obvious is the right-hand chart: one die is worth more than two — 221 points against 188 — even though it farkles two-thirds of the time against four-ninths.
The reason is hot dice. Scoring on your last die clears the board and hands you six fresh ones; two dice cannot do that in a single roll. It is the one place in Farkle where the worse-looking position is the better one.
How strong is the computer?
The levels differ in what they can see, not in how far they look ahead — searching deeper is meaningless when the dice reshuffle everything each roll.
| Level | How it plays | Points a turn |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | takes some legal combination, not the best | 325 |
| Medium | the table rule: biggest score, bank at 300 | 460 |
| Hard | the exact value of every position | 571 |
Over 20,000 games hard beats medium 72.1 % of the time and easy 95.8 %. That is a much bigger gap than most dice games manage — in Shut the Box the same comparison is nearly a coin toss, because there the obvious move is almost always the right one. Farkle punishes the obvious move twice a turn.
Which dice should you set aside?
This is the decision nobody talks about and where most points quietly go.
Take a roll of 1-1-5-2-3-4. The greedy answer is 1-1-5 for 250, leaving three dice. But 1-1 for 200 leaves four dice, and four dice in hand are worth more than the fifty points you gave up — 243 against 200 by the table above. The hard level makes that trade constantly; the medium level never does, and that alone is most of the gap between them.
What does the 500-to-start rule change?
With the switch on, your first entry has to be 500 or more in a single turn — anything under it is not written down at all. It sounds like a small house rule and it changes the opening completely.
Until you are on the board, banking 300 is worth exactly nothing. The turn is therefore not a bank-or-roll decision at all: you have to keep going to 500 whatever the dice look like, which means pushing through positions you would never push through later in the game. A player who is on the board and one who is not are playing two different games at the same table.
Turn it off and the opening becomes the same problem as every other turn. Both are played; the switch is there because neither is wrong.
What are hot dice?
Set aside all six dice in one turn and you pick all six up again, keeping everything you have collected. There is no cap: a turn can run through two or three sets of hot dice and put four figures on the board in one go.
That is also why the game rewards keeping dice in your hand rather than points on the table. Every set-aside that leaves you one die short of clearing the board is a set-aside that gave up the chance of six fresh ones — and six fresh dice are worth 602 points, more than any single scoring combination in the table above except six of a kind.
Where does Farkle come from?
A North American folk game of the push-your-luck family, closely related to a long line of dice games that ask the same question — roll again or write it down. It has been sold under a dozen trade names, which is why the scoring table beyond three of a kind never settled: every box printed its own.
The game is uncopyrightable and the rules are common property, which is why you will find it under a different name every few years.
More dice here
The Farkle score sheet prints the same table for a table with real dice. Shut the Box and Yatzy are playable here too, and dice games for two players compares seven of them by how much skill is actually in each.
