Play Beetle Online

What Is Beetle?

Beetle is the dice game with the smallest rulebook and the loudest finish. Each player rolls one die and adds the matching part to a beetle: body, head, legs, eyes, feelers and tail. There is an order to respect (the body before anything else, the head before the eyes and feelers), and a roll that does not fit is simply wasted. The first player to complete a beetle wins, and in the traditional British format they announce it by shouting “Beetle!” across the room.

There are no decisions at all. You cannot roll well, and you cannot roll badly. That sounds like a flaw, but it is the whole point: Beetle is a game for mixed tables of children, grandparents and people who have never held a die, and it runs on nothing but a pencil, a scrap of paper and one die. On Dice.now it sits with Stuck in the Mud and Pig as one of the gentlest games we host, and it is a natural warm-up before the organized chaos of Bunco.

A Short History of Beetle

Nobody has pinned down when or where the drawing game began, and the two best-known forms of it grew up on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

In Britain the game is inseparable from the Beetle Drive, a social evening in which a whole hall plays at once. Tables of four share one die, everyone starts a new beetle on the same signal, and the first player anywhere in the room to finish stops play for everybody. Winners move clockwise to the next table, losers move the other way, and the evening usually runs to about a dozen rounds. Beetle Drives were a popular fundraiser for churches, especially Nonconformist chapels, as well as for village halls, schools and clubs, and in the north of England they are often paired with a pie-and-pea supper. One vintage-games blogger describes the game as “massive in the 60s,” and several churches still advertise drives today, but I have not found a reliable source that fixes when the first one was held, so treat any specific date with suspicion. Early commercial Beetle sets sometimes came with a cardboard spinner instead of a die.

In the United States the same idea became Cootie. A pencil-and-paper “cootie” game, in which a die roll told you which part of a bug to draw, was being played by the 1920s, and a boxed version with cardboard parts appeared in 1939. The version everyone remembers came from William H. Schaper (1914–1980), a postman in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, who whittled fishing lures as a hobby. In 1948 one of his lures reminded him of a bug, and he attached the existing drawing game’s rules to a three-dimensional wooden insect. Schaper started manufacturing in his basement in 1949 with about $1,200, sold the first bugs through his family’s bakery, switched to plastic, and by 1952 had sold more than 1.2 million games. Sales passed 25 million by 1971. Tyco Toys bought Schaper in 1986 and later passed Cootie to Hasbro, whose Milton Bradley line still sells it, alongside a snap-together game marketed simply as Beetle.

Which came first, the British drawing game or the American one, is an open question. The American paper version has the earlier documented date, but the rules are so simple that they may well have been invented more than once.

Beetle Rules

Equipment

• One six-sided die (one per table at a drive)
• Pencil and paper for each player, or a commercial set with snap-together parts
• An agreed chart of which number gives which part

Object

Be the first player to complete a beetle: one body, one head, six legs, two eyes, two feelers and, depending on the version, a tail or a pair of wings.

How a Turn Works

1. Roll the die once.
2. Look up the part. If you are allowed to draw it and you do not already have all of that part, draw it.
3. If you cannot use the roll, your turn is over. Nothing happens.
4. Pass the die to the next player.
5. Winning. The moment a player draws the last missing part, they win. At a drive they shout “Beetle!” and every table stops.

The two ordering rules are what make the early game slow:

• The body comes first. Until you have rolled the body number, every other roll is wasted.
• The head comes before the eyes and feelers. Legs and tail attach to the body, so they can be drawn as soon as you have a body, but eyes and feelers attach to the head.

Parts Table

The chart below is the one used on Dice.now, which follows the Cootie order with the body on 1. The British Beetle Drive convention usually reverses it (6 body, 5 head, 4 tail or wings, 3 leg, 2 feeler, 1 eye); the game is identical either way, so pick one and write it on the sheet.

Versions that give the beetle two wings instead of one tail have 14 parts. The Cootie bug has a body, head, two antennae, two eyes, a tongue or proboscis and six legs, again 13 pieces, and its rules add one twist that Beetle does not have: a roll you can use earns you another roll, and only a wasted roll ends your turn.

How to Draw a Beetle: Worked Examples

• You roll 3, 5, 6, 2 and 1. The first four rolls are wasted because you have no body. The 1 finally gives you the body. Five rolls, one part; this is a typical start, because the body takes six rolls on average.
• You have a body and roll 4. No head yet, so the eye is wasted. A 3 or a 6 would have counted, and so would a 2.
• You have a body and head, four legs, both eyes, one feeler and the tail. You need two legs and one feeler. Three faces out of six help (3 or 5 count; a 3 twice); the odds of a useful roll are 2 in 6 until the feeler arrives, then 1 in 6 for the last leg.
• You need one leg and roll a 3. Beetle! Even if the player before you needed one leg too, the round is over.
• Two players both have everything but a leg. They are now in a pure coin-flip race, one roll each, 1 in 6 per roll. Whoever rolls first in the sequence has the edge, which is why a well-run drive alternates who starts.

The Odds of Completing a Beetle

How long does a beetle take?

Each part of a beetle is a waiting game. The body appears on one face in six, so it takes 6 rolls on average. That single fact explains the frustrating opening: roughly a third of players are still waiting for a body after six rolls, and about 16 percent are still waiting after ten.

After the body arrives, the rest is a race between several waiting games running at once. The head needs one 2; the tail needs one 6; the legs need six separate 3s, each of which takes 6 rolls on average, so the legs alone need 36 rolls on average. While you wait for six 3s, the head, eyes, feelers and tail almost always turn up on their own. That is why the legs dominate the game: once you have a body and a head, the expected number of rolls still needed is about 37, only one more than the legs would need by themselves.

Putting it all together (I built the full state-by-state expectation for the 13-part beetle and confirmed it with 400,000 simulated games):

A complete beetle needs about 44 rolls on average and the median is 42. The fastest possible beetle is 13 rolls, one for every part in a legal order. There are 33,264 legal orders out of 6¹³ possible sequences, so it happens about once in 390,000 games.

The spread

One beetle in ten takes more than 62 rolls, and one in twenty takes more than 69. In a two-player game where the players alternate single rolls, the winner is simply whoever needs fewer rolls, and the player who rolls first wins about 51 percent of the time. At a table of four, each player’s chance of winning is close to 25 percent, plus a sliver for rolling earlier in the order.

Why the wasted rolls pile up

The chance of a useful roll changes constantly. With an empty sheet it is 1 in 6. With a body it jumps to 3 in 6 (head, leg or tail). With body and head it is 4 in 6 (leg, eye, feeler or tail). Then it falls again as parts fill up: needing only the last leg means 1 in 6, exactly like the opening. A typical game spends its first six rolls and its last six rolls waiting on a single face, and only the middle third feels productive.

Beetle Strategy

There is no in-game strategy, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What follows is strategy for running the game well.

1. Accept that it is pure luck, and use that

Beetle is the game to play when the table includes people who would lose every hand of anything else: young children, guests who do not speak the language well, anyone who dislikes being outthought. Every player’s chance is identical. If someone at the table wants to win by being clever, hand them Pig instead.

2. Play a drive, not a single game

One game of Beetle is about 44 rolls per player and can end on any roll after the thirteenth, so a lone game feels arbitrary. A drive of ten or twelve rounds, scoring one point per round won (or per part drawn, see below), smooths the luck and gives the evening a shape.

3. Score parts, not just wins

At most drives the loser’s beetles are not worthless. A common method counts the number of parts each player drew in each round, so someone who lost by one leg gets 12 points rather than zero. Over an evening this ranks the players far more fairly than wins alone, and it gives everyone something to add up.

4. Rotate who rolls first

Rolling first is worth a percentage point or so per round, and in a tight finish it is decisive. Pass the starting roll one seat to the left each round, or let the loser of the previous round start.

5. Keep the die moving

Beetle’s only real failure mode is dead time. One roll per turn, no rerolls, and no pausing to admire the drawing. A round at a table of four ends as soon as the quickest of the four beetles is done, so it rarely needs more than a few minutes if the die keeps moving.

6. Teach the order with the sheet, not the rules

Children learn the sequence faster if the score sheet shows it: a big empty oval labeled “1” at the top, a circle labeled “2” attached to it, and small numbered slots for legs, eyes and feelers. Nobody needs to remember that eyes need a head if the eye slots are drawn on the head.

7. If you bet, bet on the round, not the roll

Beetle is not a gambling game, but a small stake per round (a coin in the pot, winner takes it) works well for adults precisely because there is no skill edge to argue about. Never bet on individual rolls; a one-in-six event every ten seconds is a recipe for nothing but noise.

Common Mistakes

• Drawing a head before the body. The most frequent error with new players. The body must come first; a 2 with no body is wasted.
• Drawing eyes or feelers on a headless beetle. Same rule, next level. Legs and tail attach to the body and are fine.
• Rerolling after a useful roll. That is a Cootie rule, not a Beetle rule. In traditional Beetle every turn is exactly one roll.
• Drawing a seventh leg. Six legs, two eyes, two feelers. Extra rolls of a completed part are wasted.
• Forgetting to shout. At a drive, play continues at every table until the winner announces the beetle. Quiet winners get overtaken.
• Mixing up the chart mid-game. If one table plays 1 for body and another 6 for body, a drive falls apart. Print the chart on every sheet.

Variants and House Rules

• British chart. 6 body, 5 head, 4 tail (or two wings), 3 leg, 2 feeler, 1 eye. Identical odds, reversed labels.
• Two wings instead of a tail. A 14-part beetle. The expected game length rises by only about a quarter of a roll, from 44.3 to 44.5, since the second wing usually arrives while you are waiting for legs.
• Cootie rerolls. A roll you can use earns another roll; a wasted roll ends the turn. This makes turns longer and streakier and is the standard rule in the American plastic game.
• Points for parts. Each player scores one point per part drawn in a round, with a bonus (often 5 or 10) for the completed beetle. The evening’s winner has the most points.
• Beetle Drive. Tables of four, one die per table, a shout ends the round for the whole room, winners move to the next table, prizes for the highest and lowest totals after ten or twelve rounds. The booby prize is traditional.
• Snap-together sets. Cootie and the Milton Bradley Beetle replace drawing with plastic parts; the rules are otherwise the same.

If you like Beetle’s collect-the-set feeling and want a little more to do, Round the Clock asks you to roll 1 through 12 in order with two dice, and Tenzi turns “collect ten of one number” into a speed race. For a party game with the same zero-decision charm but more noise, try Left Center Right.

Glossary

• Beetle: Both the game and the shout that ends a round.
• Beetle Drive: A multi-round social event, usually a fundraiser, in which many tables play at once.
• Body: The first part, drawn on a roll of 1 (Dice.now) or 6 (British convention). Nothing else can be drawn before it.
• Feelers: The beetle’s antennae, two of them, attached to the head.
• Wasted roll: A roll whose part you cannot draw, either because you already have it or because a required part is missing.
• Cootie: The American plastic version, sold since 1949, in which a useful roll earns another roll.
• Booby prize: The award for the lowest score at a drive, at least as coveted as the main prize.
• Waiting time: In probability, the number of rolls until a given face appears; on average 6 for any one face.

Play Beetle Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page is a best-of-three Beetle match against the computer. Each round is a race to a complete 13-part beetle using the chart above: 1 body, 2 head, 3 leg (six), 4 eye (two), 5 feeler (two), 6 tail. The body must come first, the head needs the body, and the eyes and feelers need the head. There is exactly one roll per turn, no rerolls, and a roll you cannot use is wasted, as in the traditional British game rather than Cootie.

Press Roll to throw the die. If the part fits, the die turns green, the part appears on your beetle drawing, and the checklist beside it updates (for example, “3 · Legs 4/6”). If the roll is wasted the die turns red and the message line tells you why: no body yet, no head yet, or you already have that part. The computer then takes its single roll, shown on the same die, and its beetle fills in on the right-hand card. The status bar tracks the round number, rounds won by each side, how many parts you still need, and your record. The roll log keeps the last 40 rolls.

The first complete beetle wins the round and a Next Round button appears. The loser of a round rolls first in the next one. You roll first in round 1, and the first player to win two rounds takes the match. Because the game has no decisions, the computer has no strategy to speak of; it rolls, it draws, and it is exactly as likely to win as you are.

Rolls use your browser’s cryptographic random number generator, so each face is equally likely. Your win-loss record is stored on your device only; nothing is sent to our servers. Roll for a body.