There is no bluffing here and nothing to choose. You roll until you cannot roll any more, and the table watches your dice disappear one by one. That makes Drop Dead a good filler between longer games, easy to teach across a wide age range, and good mental-arithmetic practice for kids. Below are the rules, a worked turn, the printable score sheet, the odds (an average turn scores about 16), and where the game came from.
On this page
What do you need?
- Five ordinary dice. Plain six-sided dice, with no special faces and no polyhedrals. (If you are curious about the other shapes, see types of dice.)
- Something to keep score: any scrap of paper works, or print the score sheet further down.
- Two or more players. The oldest printed rules say any number can play. In practice four to six keeps the waiting short.
No dice in the house? Roll five 3D dice for free in your browser: open the online dice roller with five dice and you can start.
How to play
Players take turns. On your turn you keep rolling until every one of your dice is dead. You have no say in when to stop.
- Roll all five dice.
- If no die shows a 2 or a 5 → add up every pip showing and add that to your turn total. All five dice survive.
- If any die shows a 2 or a 5 → the roll is void. It scores nothing, not even for the dice that came up 1, 3, 4 or 6. Every die showing a 2 or a 5 is dead: take it off the table.
- Roll again with the dice you have left, and repeat. Dead dice never come back during your turn.
- When your last die dies you have "dropped dead". Write down your turn total, which is your score for the turn, and pass the dice to the next player.
Two details settle most arguments at the table. First, a void roll costs you the whole roll, not just the dead dice: rolling 6, 6, 6, 6 and one 2 scores zero. Second, more than one die can die on the same roll: a roll with two 5s and a 2 takes three dice off at once.
Who wins? The highest total wins, but agree on the length first. The classic version gives everyone a single turn and compares totals, which swings a lot. Most groups play a fixed number of rounds (five or ten) and add up, or keep going until someone passes an agreed target such as 100.
Scoring, with a worked turn
Scoring is nothing but addition: a roll either scores every pip on the table or scores nothing. Here is one complete turn, from five dice to none.
| Throw | Dice | Result | Scores | Turn total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 | 3, 6, 1, 4, 6: no 2 and no 5 | 20 | 20 |
| 2 | 5 | 5, 3, 2, 6, 1: a 5 and a 2 die | 0 | 20 |
| 3 | 3 | 4, 4, 6: safe again | 14 | 34 |
| 4 | 3 | 6, 5, 1: the 5 dies | 0 | 34 |
| 5 | 2 | 2, 5: both die, you have dropped dead | 0 | 34 |
Thirty-four is a good turn: the average is a little over 16, and the middle score is 12. Throw 2 threw away a 6, a 3 and a 1 along with the dead dice, and that is where most points are lost.
Playing with a group? The free Dice Together Android app throws the dice on your TV through Chromecast, so everyone at the table sees the same roll and there is no argument about whether that really was a 5.
Variants and Stuck in the Mud
Drop Dead has one real rules dispute. Settle it before the first throw, because it changes the game a lot.
| Version | A roll of 5, 3, 2, 6, 1 scores… | Typical turn |
|---|---|---|
| Void roll (standard) | 0 | about 16 |
| Score the survivors (house rule) | 10 (3 + 6 + 1) | exactly 35 |
The void roll is the standard. Every rule set we could check says the same thing: a throw containing a deuce or a five is void, the offending dice are laid aside, and only a completely clean throw scores. That is the version described in Foster's Complete Hoyle in 1922 and the version the rest of this page assumes.
The other version, where you score whatever survived each roll, is the one many people meet at school under the name Stuck in the Mud: the 2s and 5s are stuck in the mud, the rest still count. It is the same mechanic with gentler scoring. We could not find a published rule book that documents that scoring or that lists Stuck in the Mud as another name for Drop Dead, so we treat it as a house rule rather than a second official version. It is a good one, though, especially with young children, because far fewer turns end on zero. Scoring the survivors makes an average turn worth exactly 35 points instead of about 16, and a scoreless turn goes from roughly one in five to roughly one in 250.
Beyond that, everything people change is about length rather than mechanics: how many rounds you play, or an agreed target score to race to. If a round finishes too fast for your table, add rounds rather than inventing new dead numbers. Killing only 2s, for instance, makes turns drag on and the scores balloon.
Free printable score sheet
Drop Dead is played over several rounds, and keeping running totals in your head is tiring. Print a blank sheet for up to four players and ten rounds: write each turn score in the left column and the running total in the right. Highest grand total wins. The button prints just the sheet. The rest of the page is left out.
Drop Dead score sheet (dice-together.com)
| Round | Player 1 | Player 2 | Player 3 | Player 4 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turn | Total | Turn | Total | Turn | Total | Turn | Total | |
| Name | ||||||||
| 1 | ||||||||
| 2 | ||||||||
| 3 | ||||||||
| 4 | ||||||||
| 5 | ||||||||
| 6 | ||||||||
| 7 | ||||||||
| 8 | ||||||||
| 9 | ||||||||
| 10 | ||||||||
| Grand total | ||||||||
The odds, and why there is nothing to decide
Every die has four faces that keep you alive (1, 3, 4 and 6) and two that kill (2 and 5), so a single die survives a throw two times out of three. For a roll to score, all of your live dice have to survive at once, which is why a full handful of five so rarely pays out:
| Dice left | Chance the roll scores | Average score when it does |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 32 in 243 (about 13%) | 17.5 |
| 4 | 16 in 81 (about 20%) | 14 |
| 3 | 8 in 27 (about 30%) | 10.5 |
| 2 | 4 in 9 (about 44%) | 7 |
| 1 | 2 in 3 (about 67%) | 3.5 |
There is a reason for the right-hand column. A die that survives is equally likely to show 1, 3, 4 or 6, and those four numbers average 3.5, the same as an ordinary die. So a scoring roll is worth 3.5 points per die, however many dice are left.
Put the whole turn together and the numbers come out like this: a turn lasts about six throws, of which fewer than three score; it is worth about 16 points on average, with a middle score of 12; roughly one turn in five scores nothing whatsoever; about a quarter of turns beat 25; only one in 24 passes 50; and fewer than one in a thousand gets past 100. (We worked those out from the exact probabilities for five dice and checked them against four million simulated turns. If that kind of thing appeals, the dice probability page is the place to start.)
The table shows no decision, because there isn't one. You must roll every die you still have, every time, so nerve and arithmetic don't change your expected score. That separates Drop Dead from its press-your-luck relatives: in Pig you decide when to bank, and in Farkle you choose which dice to set aside and when to stop. Drop Dead has the same rising tension but gives you no control, which is why it suits players too young to weigh up odds and makes a poor tournament game.
Where Drop Dead comes from
Drop Dead is American, and it is older than it looks. The earliest printed rules we could trace are in R. F. Foster's Foster's Complete Hoyle of 1922, where the entry sits on page 619 among the dice games and opens by saying the game was invented at the Coffee Club, New York
. The rules on that page are the ones above, almost word for word: five dice, any number of players, every throw containing a deuce or a five is void with those dice laid aside, and the highest total wins. The same page in the 1914 edition carries a different game, so the entry seems to have arrived with the 1922 revision.
The game is still around. Wikipedia's entry on Drop dead traces it forward through the collection Family Fun & Games (1992) and into Henk Tijms's textbook Understanding Probability (2012), which sets it as a simulation exercise. A century on, students are still asked to work out what a handful of shrinking dice is worth. For the longer story of how the cube itself got here, see the history of dice.
Frequently asked questions about Drop Dead
What are the rules of the dice game Drop Dead?
Drop Dead is played with five ordinary dice. You roll all five: if none of them shows a 2 or a 5, you add up the pips and add that total to your turn score. If any die shows a 2 or a 5, the roll scores nothing at all and every 2 and every 5 is taken off the table for good. You keep rolling with the dice you have left until the last one dies, which is when you have dropped dead and the next player takes over. The highest total wins.
Do you score anything on a roll that contains a 2 or a 5?
In the standard game, no. A roll containing a 2 or a 5 is void: it scores nothing, not even for the dice that came up other numbers, and the 2s and 5s are removed. That is how the oldest printed rules describe it. Some players score the surviving dice on every roll instead, which is a house rule worth agreeing on before you start, because it more than doubles a typical turn.
Is Drop Dead the same game as Stuck in the Mud?
They share a mechanic: five dice, and every 2 or 5 is stuck, dead and out of the round. The scoring is where they part. Drop Dead voids the whole roll as soon as a 2 or a 5 appears, while Stuck in the Mud scores the dice that survived. Say which one you are playing before the first roll, because it more than doubles a typical turn: about 16 points under Drop Dead, exactly 35 under Stuck in the Mud.
What is a good score in Drop Dead?
An average turn scores about 16 points and the middle score is 12, so anything above 25 is a good turn. Above 50 is rare: only about one turn in 24 gets there. Around one turn in five scores nothing at all, which is part of the fun. These figures come from the exact probabilities for five dice, checked against four million simulated turns.
Is there any strategy to Drop Dead?
No. You never choose anything: you have to keep rolling every die you still have until they are all dead, so no decision can improve your score. That makes it a pure luck game and a friendly one for young children, unlike Pig or Farkle, where you choose when to stop and bank what you have.
For something with a decision in it, Pig is the obvious follow-up. Or browse the complete overview of dice games, which includes a few more that suit a mixed-age table, such as the ten dice games for kids.