Farkle vs Ten Thousand vs Zilch: Scoring Compared

Farkle, Ten Thousand, Zilch, Greed, Dix Mille, Zonk, Cosmic Wimpout: they are all the same game wearing different scoring tables. You roll dice, set aside the ones that score, then decide whether to bank the turn or roll the rest and risk losing it all. This guide puts the tables side by side, explains the rules that differ between versions, and gives you the probability figures that decide when to stop, whichever name is on the box.

One Engine, Many Tables

The roll-set-aside-bank structure is a folk game with no known inventor. Its French name, Dix Mille, is often cited as the original; stories of the game arriving in North America on French ships in the 1600s circulate without documentary evidence. By the twentieth century it was being played across Europe and North America as 10,000, Greed, Zilch, Zonk, Squelch, Hot Dice and, in German-speaking countries, Volle Lotte, and every community wrote down its own table.

The commercial versions came later. Pocket Farkel has been sold since 1996 by Legendary Games, and the boxed Farkle from PlayMonster (Beloit, Wisconsin; founded as Patch Products in 1985) turned one particular table into the closest thing the game has to a standard. Cosmic Wimpout, published by C3 Inc. in 1976, took the same rhythm to five custom cubes. Both of our push-your-luck games, Farkle and Ten Thousand, use the tables below exactly as printed; the history of dice covers where the wider family came from.

Scoring Tables Side by Side

Combinations must appear in a single roll in every version. Dice set aside on earlier rolls never combine with later ones.

Three points about this table:

1. The Farkle column is the only one with an owner. Every value in it is on the rules sheet packed in the PlayMonster box. The Zilch and Greed columns describe the most common published tables, but neither name has an authority behind it, and you will meet groups who play Greed with 300 for three 1s or Zilch with three pairs at 1,500. Wikipedia’s generic table for the game lists three 1s at 1,000, flat 1,000/2,000/3,000 for four, five and six of a kind, three pairs at 1,500 and a straight at 2,500.
2. Three 1s is the biggest single swing. A roll of 1-1-1-x-x-x is 300 points in Farkle and 1,000 in the other three. That one line makes an average Ten Thousand turn worth more than an average Farkle turn.
3. Six-dice shapes are where the tables diverge most. Three pairs is 1,500 in Farkle, half that in Ten Thousand. Two triplets is a special 2,500 in Farkle but merely two triples elsewhere (2-2-2-6-6-6 is 800 in Ten Thousand). Four of a kind plus a pair is 1,500 in Farkle; in Ten Thousand the pair is dead unless it is 1s or 5s.

Cosmic Wimpout: The Five-Cube Cousin

Cosmic Wimpout keeps the bank-or-roll rhythm but changes almost everything else. There are five cubes, not six. Four are identical, with faces showing two swirls, three triangles, four lightning bolts, a 5, six stars and a 10; the fifth cube carries a wild Flaming Sun in place of one of those faces.

Three rules give the game its personality. You need at least 35 points on your opening turn to get in. If every cube scores, you must roll all five again; there is no choice, and no banking, until a roll leaves a dead cube. And a roll with no 5, 10, Flash or Freight Train is a Wimpout, which loses the turn exactly like a farkle. Games are played to 300 or 500 points, with everyone else getting one last turn once someone crosses the line.

Entry Thresholds

Most versions stop you from banking until you have proven yourself with one good turn.

The threshold matters more than it looks. Simulating a turn that keeps rolling until it reaches a target under a sensible set-aside policy, rolling until 300 succeeds about 85% of the time, rolling until 500 succeeds about 56% (and the successful turns average around 790 points), and rolling until 1,000 succeeds about 31%. A 500-point rule therefore costs the average player roughly one blank turn at the start; a 1,000-point rule costs about two. Until you are on the board the decision is made for you, so the real skill begins once you have banked.

Hot Dice, Free Rolls and Clearing the Board

Every version rewards setting aside all your dice with a fresh roll of the full set, added to the same running total: hot dice in Farkle and Ten Thousand, a free roll in Zilch, and a mandatory re-roll in Cosmic Wimpout. In the six-dice games there is no limit to how many times this can happen in one turn.

The arithmetic says always take it. A six-dice roll farkles only 2.31% of the time and, under the Farkle table, averages about 389 points; even with 3,000 already on the table the expected loss from a farkle is about 69 points against an expected gain of 389. The only reason to decline is a bank that wins the game outright. Cosmic Wimpout removes even that choice: if all five cubes score, you roll.

End-Game Rules

• Farkle: first player to bank 10,000 or more triggers one final turn for each other player, who must beat that total. On a tie, the player who reached 10,000 first wins.
• Ten Thousand: identical, with the same tiebreak on Dice.now.
• Zilch: identical, 10,000 with a final round.
• Greed / Dix Mille house rules: some tables require an exact finish (“welfare”): you must land on 10,000 precisely, and points that overshoot are forfeited, sometimes to the lowest-scoring player. Others add piggybacking, where you may pick up the dice a previous player left and continue their abandoned running total if your first roll scores.
• Cosmic Wimpout: first to 300 or 500 with a final turn for everyone else.

Penalty rules also cluster at the ends of games. Several Farkle and Ten Thousand groups deduct 500 or 1,000 after three farkles in a row; published Zilch tables deduct 500 after a run of consecutive zilches (three on some sheets, four on others) and again for each further one.

The Probability of Farkling, by Dice Count

The single most useful table in the game. It applies to Farkle, Ten Thousand and Zilch alike, because all three treat 1s, 5s, triples, straights and three pairs as scoring dice, so the set of rolls that score nothing is identical. The average points differ because the tables differ.

Roughly, the risk of one more roll doubles every time you set a die aside. With six dice you will see at least one 1 about 66.5% of the time, a 1 or a 5 about 91% of the time, and at least three of a kind about 36.7% of the time. Three pairs appears on 3.86% of six-dice rolls (about 1 in 26), a straight on 1.54% (1 in 65) and six of a kind on 1 in 7,776. The dice probability guide shows how these figures are derived.

Break-Even Totals: When to Stop

Take the running total T and the number of dice n you would roll. One more roll is worth about (average points) minus (farkle chance × T). Setting that to zero gives the total at which rolling stops paying:

These single-roll figures ignore the rolls that follow and the chance of hot dice, so they slightly understate the case for rolling, but the shape is what matters. Bank at 300 with three dice, at about 800 to 900 with four, and almost never with five or six. Ten Thousand’s richer table pushes every line a little higher, which is why its games swing harder. Beyond the arithmetic, both games flip late: behind by 2,000 with an opponent past 7,000, raise your bar and gamble; ahead, tighten up and make your opponent take the risks. On a final turn after someone reaches 10,000, only a total that beats theirs is worth anything, so roll until you have it or bust.

Which Variant Should You Play?

• Farkle if you want a table everyone can agree on and a game that ends in 15 to 20 minutes. Our version drops the 500-point entry rule to keep it moving and plays you against a computer that banks at 300 with three dice and always rolls hot dice.
• Ten Thousand if you want the classic folk table, the tension of the entry threshold, and turns where three 1s or a doubled four of a kind can be worth a fifth of the game.
• Zilch if your group likes penalty rules and a slightly punishing opening, or if you learned the game from one of the many browser versions that use its name.
• Cosmic Wimpout if you want mandatory re-rolls, a wild cube and the possibility of winning or losing on a single throw.

If the bank-or-roll decision is what you enjoy, Zombie Dice applies it to brains and shotguns, Pig strips it down to a single die, and King of Tokyo wraps a three-roll re-roll around monster combat. If you prefer combinations without the risk, the scorecard games Yahtzee and Qwixx are the natural alternatives. For a printable pad that fits any of the four tables above, use the Farkle score sheet.