5 Roll

How to play 5 Roll

You roll all five dice, then decide which to keep and which to throw again.

• Click a die to hold it, click again to release it.
• You get a limited number of rolls per turn, and the dice you hold carry over between them.
• When you are done, choose a box on the scorecard and enter your score there.
• Each box can only be used once, for the whole game.
• If nothing fits, you must still choose a box, and it takes a zero.
• The game ends when all forty two boxes are filled.

The multiplier columns

Each row of the scorecard has columns for a 1x, 2x and 3x multiplier. Rolling five dice of the same colour is what unlocks the higher columns.

This changes the arithmetic of the whole game. A modest combination banked at 3x can be worth more than a strong one at 1x, which means the question is never simply what did I roll, but which column can I put it in.

Reading the scorecard

The right hand side lists every way to score. Read it properly once, at the start, rather than glancing at it each turn. Most of the bad decisions in dice games come from not knowing that a box exists until it is the last one left.

Tips and strategy

The zero is a decision, not an accident

Every game will produce turns where nothing fits. The skill is choosing which box eats the damage, and choosing it early rather than late.

Sacrifice a box that is hard to fill and worth little, and do it while you still have most of the card open. Players who protect every box end up with a zero in one of the high scoring rows, which costs far more.

Hold for the shape, not the number

The instinct is to keep whichever dice show the highest value. That is usually wrong.

Keep the dice that are already working together. Three of a kind is worth more than two high singles, because it is one die away from something and they are not. A pair of low dice pointing at a combination beats a lone six pointing at nothing.

Chase the multiplier when you are close

• Two rolls left and four of a colour showing: chase it.
• One roll left and three of a colour: usually not worth breaking a good combination for.
• Never break a completed high value combination to reach for a multiplier. A sure thing at 1x beats a maybe at 3x.

Fill the awkward boxes early

The combinations that need specific dice are the ones you cannot summon on demand. Take them when they appear, even if the score is lower than you would like, because waiting for a better version of the same combination is how boxes end up empty.

The easy boxes are easy at any point in the game. That is exactly why they should be left for last.

Opening turns set the ceiling

The first third of the game decides how high your final score can go, and it does it quietly.

Fill the flexible boxes early and you arrive at the end with only rigid ones left, each demanding an exact combination that may never come. Fill the rigid ones when the dice offer them and the endgame becomes a series of choices rather than a series of zeros.

A practical way to think about it: after each turn, look at how many of your remaining boxes could accept the roll you just had. If that number is falling faster than the turns are, you are filling in the wrong order.

Where the luck actually sits

Luck decides which dice come up. It does not decide where you write the result, and that second part is most of the final score. Two players with identical rolls will finish thirty or forty points apart, and the whole gap is scorecard decisions.

If you like games where the randomness is real but the decisions matter more, Rummikub works the same way with tiles, and there is more in board.