Play Drop Dead Online

What Is Drop Dead?

Drop Dead is a five-dice game with no decisions at all. You throw the dice, and one of two things happens. If no die shows a 2 or a 5, the throw is clean: add up all the dice and throw them again. If any die shows a 2 or a 5, the throw is dead: it scores nothing, and every die that showed a 2 or a 5 is taken out of play. You carry on with whatever survives. Sooner or later your last die comes up 2 or 5 and you have dropped dead. Whatever you scored before that moment is your total for the turn.

That is the whole game, and its charm is that it is honest about being pure luck. Most dice games on Dice.now hide their luck behind choices: Farkle and Pig ask when to stop, Yahtzee asks what to keep, Threes asks which dice to set aside. Drop Dead asks nothing. It is the dice game to play when you want to watch streaks happen rather than manage them: the five-throw run that piles up 60 points, the turn that dies on the first throw, the single last die that somehow survives four times in a row. Its close twin, Stuck in the Mud, uses the same bad numbers but lets the surviving dice score in a dead throw, which more than doubles the scores and softens the swings.

A Short History of Drop Dead

Drop Dead has no known inventor. The earliest description we can find is in Foster’s Complete Hoyle, the 1922 edition of the rules encyclopedia compiled by Robert Frederick Foster (1853–1945), the Scottish-born American authority on card, dice and board games who wrote more than fifty books on how games are played and won. Foster listed the game among the dice games of his day, and later summaries, including the Wikipedia entry that cites him, say it was “created in New York.” The city is plausible, given where Foster worked and the crowd of dice games that flourished in American bars in the early twentieth century, but no primary source pins down a year or a first player, so treat the 1920s New York origin as the best available account rather than an established fact.

The game survived because it is easy to print. It appears in family game anthologies such as Sterling’s Family Fun & Games (1992) and on rules sites like dice-play.com, always with the same core: five dice, 2 and 5 are fatal, a dead throw scores nothing, keep going until the dice are gone. The rules have barely moved in a century, which is unusual for a folk game and a sign that there was never much to argue about.

Drop Dead’s second career is in the classroom. Because a turn is a chain of independent throws whose outcome depends only on the number of live dice, it is a tidy exercise in probability and simulation. Henk Tijms uses it in his textbook Understanding Probability (Cambridge University Press, 2012) as a simulation problem, asking students to estimate the expected score of a turn. The exact answer is worked out below.

Drop Dead Rules

Equipment

• Five six-sided dice
• Pen and paper for a running tally
• Any number of players; two is plenty

Object

Score the most points. In the traditional game everyone takes one turn and the highest turn wins. On Dice.now you and the computer each take one turn per round for three rounds, and the higher three-round total wins the match.

How a Turn Works

1. Throw all five dice.
2. Check for 2s and 5s. If none appear, the throw is clean: add the total of all the dice to your turn score and throw all of them again.
3. If any 2 or 5 appears, the throw scores nothing. Remove every die showing a 2 or a 5; those dice are dead for the rest of the turn.
4. Throw the surviving dice and repeat. The same rule applies however many dice you have left: a clean throw scores its total, a throw with a 2 or 5 scores zero and kills those dice.
5. When your last die dies, you have dropped dead. Your turn score is added to your running total and play passes to the next player.

There is no limit on the number of throws, and no option to stop early. A die can only die by showing a 2 or a 5, and dead dice never come back during the turn.

Scoring Table

A clean throw scores the plain total of the dice, with no bonuses for doubles or runs. Because a clean throw can never contain a 2 or a 5, the average value of a die in a scoring throw is (1 + 3 + 4 + 6) ÷ 4 = 3.5, exactly the same as an ordinary die.

Worked Examples

• Throw 1: 1-3-4-6-6. Clean. Score 20. Throw all five again. Throw 2: 2-3-4-6-6. One 2: the throw scores nothing and that die is dead. Throw 3 (four dice): 3-4-6-6. Clean, +19, turn score 39. Throw 4: 5-1-1-1. The 5 dies, no score. Throw 5 (three dice): 6-1-4. Clean, +11, turn score 50. Throw 6: 2-2-2. All three die at once. Dropped dead with 50, a turn in the top 4 percent.
• Throw 1: 2-5-5-1-3. Three dice die immediately, no score. Throw 2 (two dice): 5-2. Both die. Dropped dead with 0 after two throws. About one turn in five ends with nothing.
• Throw 1: 2-2-5-5-2. Every die dead on the first throw. Score 0. This happens once in 243 turns.
• Throws 1 to 4 kill one die each without a clean throw: down to a single die with 0 points. Throw 5: 6. +6. Throw 6: 4. +10. Throw 7: 1. +11. Throw 8: 5. Dead. Turn score 11, which is about average for a turn that reaches the last die with nothing banked: a lone die is worth 7 points on average, because it survives two throws on average and each survivor scores 3.5.
• Final round, you have 41, the computer finished on 58. You need 18 or more. A clean first throw averages 17.5, so a single clean throw probably gets you there, but only 13.2 percent of five-dice throws are clean. Nothing you do changes those odds; the round is simply waiting to see.

The Odds

Everything about a Drop Dead turn follows from one number: each die dies on any given throw with probability 2 in 6, or one third, independently of every other die.

Chance of a clean throw

A throw of n dice is clean only if every die avoids 2 and 5, so the probability is (4/6)ⁿ = (2/3)ⁿ:

Five dice score big when they score, but they are clean less than one throw in seven. A single die is clean two throws in three but scores only 3.5 a time.

Expected turn score, computed exactly

Let E(n) be the expected number of points still to come when you have n live dice. With one die, each throw either scores (average 3.5, probability 2/3) or ends the turn (probability 1/3), so the die survives two throws on average and E(1) = 2 × 3.5 = 7. For more dice the recurrence is: a clean throw (probability (2/3)ⁿ) adds 3.5n and leaves you with the same n dice, while each dead throw removes k dice with binomial probability and leaves E(n − k). Solving gives:

So a full turn is worth 16.07 points on average and lasts about six throws, of which roughly 2.7 are clean. Notice how little the fourth and fifth dice add: going from three dice to five raises the expected score by only 2.4 points, because every extra die makes a clean throw less likely.

How turns are distributed

We enumerated the full distribution of turn scores (and checked it against a million simulated turns):

The median turn is 12, well below the mean of 16, because a few long streaks pull the average up. Over a three-round match the average total is about 48 with a standard deviation of 28; a total of 44 is the median and 64 or more is a top-quarter result. In two matches out of five one player will beat the other by 25 points or more, which is the kind of swing a decision-free game produces.

Drop Dead Strategy

Drop Dead offers no choices during a turn, so “strategy” here means knowing the odds, choosing formats that suit the group, and not fooling yourself. Every tip below applies to the real-table game as much as to the version on this page.

1. Know what a normal turn looks like

An average turn is 16 points, a median turn is 12, and one turn in five is zero. If you go into a match expecting to score 30 every round you will feel robbed; if you know that 30 happens one time in six you will enjoy it when it comes.

2. Judge a match by totals, not by single rounds

With so much variance in a single turn, the three-round format on Dice.now exists to make the better-luck player win more consistently. A 40-point round followed by two zeros is an ordinary outcome, not a collapse. If you are playing at a table, agree on several rounds rather than one.

3. Do not expect the fifth die to matter much

Five dice are worth only 16 points on average against 13.7 for three. New players see five dice and imagine 25-point throws; the odds see a clean throw one time in seven. Adjust your hopes and the game becomes calmer.

4. Remember that the last die is the most productive

A lone die scores two-thirds of the time and is worth 7 points on average, almost half of a whole turn’s expectation. A turn that reaches the last die with nothing banked is not over; a third of all points come from the final one or two dice.

5. Use the odds to set fair handicaps

Playing with a child, or with someone who has never rolled dice before? Give the weaker player a bonus of 5 points a round: the game is luck, so the handicap does not distort anything. For an adult game, spot yourself nothing and let the dice sort it out.

6. Set stakes that fit a 20 percent zero rate

If you play for a pot, remember that the loser’s turn is often a genuine zero. A stake per game, not per point, keeps things friendly. Betting per point in Drop Dead means a single 60-point turn can cost the table a fortune, which is fun exactly once.

7. Use it to teach expected value

Drop Dead is a superb first probability lesson because every throw has only two outcomes and the expected score can be computed by hand for one die (7 points) and by a short recursion for five (16.07). Have students guess the average turn, then play twenty turns and compare. The guesses are almost always too high.

8. Ignore the “due” feeling

After three dead throws in a row, the fourth throw’s chance of being clean is exactly what it was before. The dice have no memory and no sense of fairness. Nobody is “due” a clean throw, and a hot streak has no momentum.

Common Mistakes

• Scoring the good dice in a dead throw. A throw of 2-6-6-6-6 is worth zero, not 24. If you want the other dice to count, you are playing Stuck in the Mud, a different game with different averages.
• Killing a die on a 2 or 5 in a throw and also scoring it. Dead throws remove dice and score nothing; both halves of the rule apply at once.
• Stopping early. There is no hold. A player who “banks” 30 points and hands the dice over is inventing a new game (a good one, but say so before you start).
• Bringing dead dice back. Dead dice stay dead until the next turn.
• Forgetting the tally. A turn can run to ten or more throws; add as you go, or use the on-screen turn score.
• Reading meaning into streaks. Five clean throws in a row happens; so do five dead ones. Neither says anything about the next throw.

Variants and House Rules

• One turn each. The original format: everyone takes a single turn and the highest score wins. Fast, brutal, and the reason a pot version works so well.
• Three or five rounds. Adding rounds smooths the luck. Dice.now uses three; the average total rises to about 48.
• Race to a target. Keep running tallies and play until someone reaches 100 or 200. Expect a race to 100 to take about six turns each.
• Different killers. Some tables make 1 and 6 the dead faces, or a single face such as 1. A single killer face makes throws clean far more often ((5/6)⁵ = 40 percent for five dice) and roughly triples the scores.
• Stuck in the Mud scoring. Let the dice that are not 2 or 5 score even in a dead throw. This is Stuck in the Mud, average turn 35 rather than 16.
• Drop Dead with a hold. Allow a player to stop after any clean throw and bank the turn score. This turns the game into a five-dice cousin of Pig and creates a real decision.
• Pot play. Everyone antes, one turn each, highest turn takes the pot; ties split it or roll off.
• Handicaps. Give younger players a fixed bonus per round or a sixth die.

If you like the streaky feel but want a say in the outcome, try Farkle or Ten Thousand, where you decide when to stop before the dice kill you. For a still simpler luck game to play alongside a child, Beetle and Bunco ask nothing but rolling and counting.

Glossary

• Clean throw: A throw with no 2 and no 5; scores the total of the dice.
• Dead throw: A throw with at least one 2 or 5; scores nothing.
• Dead die: A die that showed a 2 or a 5 and has been removed from the turn.
• Live dice: The dice still in play.
• Drop dead: To lose your last live die and end your turn.
• Turn score: The total of your clean throws in one turn.
• Running tally: Your total across turns or rounds.
• Graveyard: On Dice.now, the row of small red dice showing which dice have died this turn.
• Expected score: The long-run average of a turn, 16.07 points from five dice.

Play Drop Dead Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page is Drop Dead against the computer over three rounds, higher total wins. Press Roll to throw your live dice. A clean throw turns the dice green and adds the total to your turn score; a dead throw marks every 2 and 5 in red, and after a moment those dice move to the Dead dice row and disappear from the live set, so you always see exactly how many dice you have left. The cards above the dice show dice left, turn score and the number of throws so far. When your last die dies the game announces your score, banks it in the scoreboard, and the computer plays its turn in full view, one throw at a time, with every result written to the log.

After three rounds the higher total wins and the result appears with your best single round and your win-loss record, both stored on your device only. There are no decisions to make, which is the point, but there is plenty to watch: the odds table above tells you a five-dice throw is clean 13 percent of the time, and the game lets you see how streaky that really feels. Throw the dice.