Farkle is a very addictive and arbitrary dice game, which we discovered quite randomly
and have modified a bit. It's fun, you should try it.
What you will need:
- Yourself
- At least one other person (the more the merrier)
- Six six-sided dice
- Pencil and paper to keep score on
Play begins with one person tossing all the dice. This beginning roll is the toughest,
since you need 500 points to stay. Don't worry, I do get to scoring in a moment. In any
given roll, you must have at least three dice you can keep before you can stop
rolling. Play proceeds by rolling all the dice initially, setting aside what can be
kept, and rerolling the rest. If at any time a person rolls the dice and nothing comes
up which can be kept, he or she has "farkled", and play progresses to the next
person with no points scored to the poor chump who farkled. If the farkled player was
"in" and the next player is "in", they can try to
steal the points the other person racked up before farkling.
Example: Let's say I'm playing against Momo and Susie. I roll the dice a few
times, get 1500 points, but then (being greedy) I try to get some more and farkle out
with two dice. Momo, who sits beside me, can choose to take those two dice and try to
add on to the 1500 points I'd accumulated and add it to his own score. If he farkles on
this roll, Susie can also take a shot at it. If a farkle comes back to the player who
initially rolled it, all scores are reset to 0. If Momo is successful with my
farkle, however, he gets those points and then gets to take his own turn. Lucky Momo....
Obviously, if someone is very very far ahead of you in points, it's a good strategy to
try to reset the scores. Now, on to scoring!
- A 1 by itself is worth 100 points
- A 5 by itself is worth 50 points
- Any three of a kind rolled at the same time are worth 100 times the value of
the pips showing. Except for ones - they're worth 1000 as 3-of-a-kind. If you roll 3
ones in several different rolls, though, this is 300 points, and not 1000. The same
applies for fives. 3 fives rolled seperately equal only to 150 points.
- A run of all the dice, regardless of how they're rolled, are worth 1000 points
- Six of a kind rolled in multiple rolls are worth 500 times the pips showing,
except for ones - six of a kind for ones are worth 5000 points
- Six of a kind rolled in a single roll are worth 1000 times the pips showing. Six of
a kind for ones are worth 10000 points
- If, after rolling all the dice, you can keep everything on the table, you can
choose to continue rolling, with all the dice. There are bonus points associated with
taking this risk - 100 points after the first roll, 200 for the second time you keep
going, 400 for the next, 800 after that, 1600 after that... you get the point.
- If you roll all the dice and get nothing at all to keep (this is called "farkling
out"), you lose 1000 points - if you don't have 1000 points to lose, you lose what you
have, and the rest gets split up between the other players.
We usually play to about 10,000 points, but any random high number will do. If all this
scoring stuff sounds like too much work, don't despair - Todd has written a computer
version of Farkle! According to Todd it "probably runs on anything that supports a
modern ncurses" but it has only been tested on FreeBSD and Linux. Also according to
Todd, it should be fairly straightforward to port it to another platform. It has several
nifty features, such as AI players that will kick your ass, and an option to invoke The
Farkle Gods. Beware, though, these deities are fickle... one minute they're blessing
your dice, the next you've been cursed. Download Farkle now!
And for those of you who have downloaded it and need a little help getting things
started, here's some technical documentation.
Enjoy!
So, is this page thoroughly confusing? If so, let
me know. Farkle is one of those games that's sort of intuitively obvious to play
once you know how, and rather difficult to explain to anyone else. I'll endeavour to
make this less obfuscated if anyone takes the time to ask, though.
Coming soon! NetFarkle!