Play Going to Boston Online

What Is Going to Boston?

Going to Boston is a three-dice game that takes about fifteen seconds to teach and about fifteen seconds to play. Roll three dice and keep the highest. Roll the other two and keep the higher. Roll the last one. Add the three kept dice, and the highest total at the table wins the round. That is the entire game.

It belongs to the family of pub and tavern dice games in which everybody takes the same simple turn and compares results, alongside Chuck-a-Luck and Under and Over 7 on the betting side and Bunco on the party side. Unlike those, it has a three-throw structure that gives each turn a small arc: a strong first throw, a decent second, and a last die that is nothing but luck. It is also the simplest relative of Ship, Captain and Crew, which uses the same “set aside and rethrow” mechanism but demands specific numbers.

A Short History of Going to Boston

The game has three names and no known inventor. The oldest description I can point to is in Sharps and Flats (1894), John Nevil Maskelyne’s exposé of cheating at games of chance. In a chapter on dice, Maskelyne picks out four games “which are commonly played” to show how crooked dice are used: Over and Under Seven, Sweat, Hazard, and “Yankee-grab or Newmarket.” His description of the last one is the modern game exactly: three dice, three throws, keep the highest die after each of the first two throws, and add the three; “the highest score wins all the stakes.” He adds two details that have since dropped out of most rulebooks. In “the English Colonies” the ace counted as seven, so players aimed for 21 rather than 18, and any player could choose to throw one die at a time instead of three, two and one.

Maskelyne’s interest was in the cheating. The natural con, he explains, is a loaded die that reliably shows a 6, secured on each of the first two throws, while the final die “must be left to chance.” A bolder sharp used three loaded dice but deliberately showed a low number on one of the early throws to avoid suspicion, and Maskelyne records the trick of a cheat offering a dupe “double or quits” on three throws of a single die, then switching in a doctored die he calls a “dispatcher.” The lesson for us is that in 1894 the game was familiar enough in gambling circles to be worth rigging.

Where the names came from is less clear. Newmarket is a Suffolk town famous for horse racing and also the name of an unrelated English card game; Yankee Grab suggests an American origin or at least an American reputation; Going to Boston and Going to Town are the names used in most American rulebooks of the twentieth century. Several modern sources call the game eighteenth-century, and one modern reconstruction of period games gives it a race-to-100 form with bonuses, but the compiler of that list honestly notes that he has not seen an eighteenth-century source, and neither have I. Treat the game as documented from the 1890s and probably older, and treat any claim about a specific Boston connection as folklore. The USS Constitution Museum in Boston publishes a rules sheet for it among its leisure-time activities, which says something about the game’s reputation if not its origin.

Going to Boston Rules

Equipment

• Three six-sided dice
• A dice cup (optional, but traditional in a game that was once a cheat’s favorite)
• Chips or coins if you play for a stake, and paper to tally rounds

Object

Score the highest total at the table in a round, and win more rounds than anyone else over an agreed number of rounds.

How a Turn Works

1. First throw. Roll all three dice. Set aside the die showing the highest number. If two or three dice tie for highest, set aside only one of them.
2. Second throw. Roll the remaining two dice. Set aside the higher one.
3. Third throw. Roll the last die. It counts as it lands.
4. Score. Add the three set-aside dice. The total is between 3 and 18.
5. Next player. Each player takes one turn per round, in order around the table.
6. Round winner. The highest total wins the round. Ties are handled by house rule (see below).
7. Winning the game. Play a fixed number of rounds and count round wins, or play for a stake each round.

The key rule is that you must keep the highest die. You may not set aside a lower die, and you may not rethrow a die you have set aside. There is nothing to decide.

Scoring Table

How to Score: Worked Examples

• You roll 6-4-2, keep the 6; roll 5-1, keep the 5; roll 3. Total 6 + 5 + 3 = 14. A slightly above-average turn, and the shape of most good turns: strong start, decent middle, ordinary finish.
• You roll 3-3-1, keep one 3; roll 2-2, keep one 2; roll 1. Total 6. Only about 0.6 percent of turns score 6 or less, so you have been unlucky rather than outplayed.
• You roll 6-6-6. You keep one 6 only; the other two go back in the cup. Three of a kind on the first throw is worth nothing extra in the standard game (a bonus for it is a house rule).
• You roll 5-5-4, keep a 5; roll 6-2, keep the 6; roll 6. Total 17. The second and third throws outscored the first, which happens more often than intuition suggests, because the first throw’s average of 4.96 is a ceiling only in the sense that you got to pick.
• Multiplication variant: 6, 5 and then 2. (6 + 5) × 2 = 22. The same dice in the standard game score 13, an average turn; in the multiplication game 22 is well below the average of 33, because the single last die did all the damage.
• Multiplication variant: 4, 3 and then 6. (4 + 3) × 6 = 42, a good score from two poor throws. This is why the variant feels so different.

The Odds of Going to Boston

The value of choosing the highest

The highest of n dice is at least k unless every die is below k, so the chance the highest is exactly k is (kⁿ − (k − 1)ⁿ) ÷ 6ⁿ. That gives the full distribution of each kept die:

Working the averages: 4.958 is 119/24, 4.472 is 161/36, and 3.5 is the plain average of a die. Add them and the expected total for a turn is 12.93. The first throw produces a 5 or 6 more than 70 percent of the time; the last throw produces a 1 or 2 a third of the time. Almost all of the variation between turns comes from the last two dice.

Distribution of totals

Combining the three distributions gives the chance of every total:

Some landmarks:

• 13 is the most common total and the median; 12, 13 and 14 together cover 44 percent of turns.
• 15 or better happens on 28 percent of turns; 10 or worse on 17 percent.
• 18 needs a 6 in each of the three throws: 91/216 × 11/36 × 1/6, about 2.1 percent, or one turn in 47.
• 3 needs three 1s on the first throw, then two 1s, then a 1: one turn in 46,656.
• The standard deviation is about 2.5 points, and three-quarters of turns fall between 10 and 15.

Head-to-head

Two players with independent turns tie about 11 percent of the time and each wins the other 44.5 percent. Over a five-round match, the odds that at least one round is tied are about 44 percent, which is why a tie rule matters more here than in most dice games. With four players the chance that at least two tie for the highest total rises further.

The multiplication variant

Scoring (first + second) × third changes everything. The average is about 33, the maximum 72 comes up 2.1 percent of the time (it needs three 6s, just like 18 does), and a total of 36 or more happens on 44 percent of turns. The final die multiplies the other two, so a 1 on the last throw caps you at 12 whatever came before, and a 6 turns even 3 + 2 into 30. Ties are rarer, about 3.6 percent, because there are far more possible totals.

Going to Boston Strategy

There is no way to play a turn well or badly; the rules choose your dice for you. Everything below is about running the game, betting on it and teaching with it.

1. Know what average looks like

A turn of 13 is dead average. If you are choosing whether to stay in a side bet after seeing your own total, 15 beats roughly 72 percent of opposing turns, 16 beats about 84 percent, and 17 beats about 92 percent. A 12 loses to about 58 percent.

2. Decide the tie rule before the first throw

With ties in one round out of nine, the argument will come. The three standard options are: nobody wins (the stake carries over), the tied players throw again, or the tied players split. Carrying over is the most exciting for a betting game because it builds the pot.

3. Rotate the starting player

Going to Boston has no first-player advantage in the standard game, since all turns are independent, but if you play “the last player to throw sees every score first” side bets, order matters. Passing the cup one seat left each round keeps everyone honest.

4. Use fixed stakes, not escalating ones

Because no skill is involved, a betting game of Going to Boston is a pure lottery with a house edge of zero. Keep stakes small and equal. The game’s history as a cheat’s favorite is a reminder to use a cup and dice everyone can inspect.

5. Play best-of-five or best-of-seven, not a single round

A single round is a coin flip with extra steps. Over five rounds the better luck usually shows, and ties are less likely to decide the outcome. If a match ends level, use the grand total of all turns as the tiebreak.

6. Teach the “highest of three” idea with it

This is the cleanest demonstration of why choosing from several dice raises your expected value: 3.5 for one die, 4.47 for the better of two, 4.96 for the best of three. Children who have grasped that are ready for Yahtzee, where deciding which dice to keep is the whole game.

7. Try multiplication when addition gets stale

The variant keeps the same turn but makes the last die the star. It plays well with people who enjoy a swingy finish, and it makes a good mental-arithmetic exercise for children: everyone at the table has to compute (a + b) × c quickly.

Common Mistakes

• Keeping a lower die. You must set aside the highest. Keeping a 4 and rethrowing a 6 “for a better spread” is not allowed and would not help anyway.
• Keeping two dice after a tied first throw. 6-6-2 sets aside one 6, and two dice are rethrown.
• Rethrowing a kept die. Once a die is set aside it is fixed for the turn.
• Applying bonuses that are not in the rules. Three of a kind and pairs score nothing unless the house has agreed otherwise.
• Forgetting the tie rule. Agree it beforehand; ties are common.
• Miscounting in the multiplication game. The formula is (first kept + second kept) × third kept, in the order the dice were kept, not the product of all three.

Variants and House Rules

• Newmarket / Yankee Grab. The same game under its older British names, usually played for a stake per round with the highest total taking the pot.
• Ace counts seven. Maskelyne’s colonial variant: a 1 is worth 7, so the perfect score is 21 and a 1 is the best die, not the worst.
• One die at a time. Maskelyne notes that a player could elect to throw one die on each throw. The expected total drops to 10.5, so it was presumably a bravado option rather than a sensible one.
• Multiplication. Score (first + second) × third. Maximum 72, average about 33. Also used as a name for the whole game in some rulebooks.
• Race to 100. Each round’s total is added to a running score and the first player to 100 wins. One modern reconstruction adds bonuses: three of a kind on the first throw scores 30 regardless of face value, and a pair on the second throw scores 15.
• Low wins. Keep the lowest die each throw and aim for 3. The odds mirror the standard game exactly.
• Carry-over pot. A tied round leaves the stakes in the pot for the next round.

For a step up in complexity with the same equipment, try Ship, Captain and Crew, which uses five dice and requires a 6, 5 and 4 in sequence, or Chuck-a-Luck, which turns three dice into a betting layout. Threes and Centennial also set dice aside, but in those games you choose what to keep.

Glossary

• Throw: One roll of whichever dice have not yet been set aside.
• Set aside (keep): Remove the highest die from play for the rest of the turn.
• Total: The sum of the three kept dice, from 3 to 18.
• Round: One turn for every player, won by the highest total.
• Newmarket, Yankee Grab, Going to Town: Alternative names for the same game.
• Multiplication: The variant scoring (first + second) × third, maximum 72.
• Dispatcher: A doctored die used by nineteenth-century cheats, described by Maskelyne.
• Grand total: The sum of a player’s totals across all rounds, used to break ties in a match.

Play Going to Boston Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page is a five-round match against the computer using the standard rules. In every round you go first. Press Roll 3 dice; the highest die is set aside automatically (if two or three tie for highest, one of them is kept) and shown as a held die. The button then reads Roll 2 dice, and after that Roll last die. The three kept dice are added, the message line reports your total, and the computer takes its turn in the same three visible steps. The status bar shows the round number out of five, rounds won by each side, the running total of the turn in progress, and your record.

The Round Table panel records each round’s score for you and the computer, names the round winner, and keeps a running count of rounds won and of grand totals. The higher total wins the round and scores one point; a tied round scores nobody. After five rounds, the player with more points wins the match. If points are level, the higher grand total wins; if grand totals are level too, the match is drawn and counts as neither a win nor a loss in your record. The log keeps the last 40 events, including the arithmetic for each score.

The Addition / Multiplication button toggles the variant. In multiplication mode each turn scores (first kept + second kept) × third kept, the hint text reminds you of the formula, and the maximum becomes 72. The toggle is locked from your first roll until the match ends; pressing it after a match starts a new game in the other mode, and your choice is remembered on your device. The computer has no decisions to make, so there is no AI strategy; it plays exactly the same rules you do.

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