Five Dice

Choosing where to spend a roll

Three rolls, then a mandatory commitment

Each turn starts with all five dice rolled. You may re-roll up to twice more, holding any combination between rolls — including holding nothing, or holding everything and declining the rest of your rolls.

When the turn ends you must commit to a category that has not been used yet. There is no skipping. Fourteen categories means fourteen turns, and every one has to be filled before the game ends.

Six of the categories are face totals: Single Marks through Six Marks, each scoring the sum of the dice showing that face. The other eight are combination categories with their own formulas, several of which add a fixed bonus on top of the dice total.

Categories are a budget, not a menu

Because you must fill every category, the real decision each turn is which box to spend, not which box to chase. A poor roll always has to go somewhere, so the skill is keeping a cheap category in reserve to absorb it. Single Marks is the classic dump — a bad turn spent there costs you a handful of points, while the same turn spent on Five-Step costs you everything that category was worth.

Face categories reward the high faces disproportionately: three sixes scores eighteen while three ones scores three. That means the low face boxes are the natural dumping grounds and the high ones deserve genuine attempts.

Among the combinations, the sequences are the most fragile. Five-Step needs all five dice in an unbroken run and pays the dice total plus a large fixed bonus, so it is worth pursuing early while you still have re-rolls to spend and other boxes open as fallbacks. Attempting it on your last few turns, with nowhere safe to dump a miss, is how good games end badly.

What each combination pays

The combination categories mix dice totals with fixed bonuses, which changes how valuable a given roll is depending on where you put it. Two & Three and Five-Step both pay the dice total plus a bonus, so a high-value set is worth noticeably more in those boxes than a low-value one that satisfies the same pattern.

Common mistakes

Every one of these is a way of running out of somewhere safe to put a bad roll.

• Filling the low face categories early. They are your insurance against a wasted turn; spending them while things are going well leaves nothing to absorb a bad roll later.
• Chasing Five-Step late. With few turns left and no cheap box in reserve, a missed sequence has to be written off somewhere expensive.
• Using all three rolls out of habit. If the dice already make a good category, stopping protects it — a re-roll can only take the set apart.
• Treating Open Hand as a dump. It scores the full dice total, so it rewards a genuinely high set and is wasted on a scattered low one.

What is different about this version

The scorecard previews what the current dice would score in every category before you commit, so choosing between two options is an informed comparison rather than mental arithmetic. Categories already used are shown filled rather than hidden, which keeps the remaining budget visible at all times.

The scoring function validates its input rather than trusting it: any hand that is not five dice each showing one through six scores zero rather than producing a nonsense value. Combination categories are checked against face counts computed fresh from the dice, so a category only pays when the pattern is genuinely present.

Written by the Silverweb Games team from this game’s own implementation. Last reviewed July 31, 2026.