Dice games for seniors: easy rules and dice you can see

Below are the games worth playing with an older group, including the two everybody asks about that our dice cannot do. Bigger dice make all of them easier, and the roller on this site gives you bigger dice: put it on a TV, give each die its own color for contrast, and roll with one tap instead of a grip. We are not going to tell you that dice games hold off cognitive decline, because we have no evidence for that. They are good company and an easy hour.

Dice you can actually see

A standard die is 16 mm across. Across a card table, in ordinary room light, that is hard to read for a lot of people, and the usual workaround, a jumbo foam die, is one more thing to buy, store and fetch. A screen avoids the problem. Here is what it can do, so you can decide whether it suits your group.

• On the television. The free Android app casts the dice to a Chromecast, an Android TV or a Google TV, and then the dice are as big as the screen. Everyone sees the same roll at the same time, from wherever they are sitting, and nobody has to lean in over the table. This is the single biggest difference you can make, and it costs nothing.
• Color and contrast, per die. Tap the pencil button next to ROLL and you can give each die its own color: nine ready-made ones, or mix your own with hue, saturation and lightness sliders and a live preview. Pick a dark color and the pips switch to white automatically, so a die never ends up dark-on-dark. If one player reads red-on-white best and another prefers white pips on deep blue, you can have both on the table at once. Note that the pencil is there in free play, and it goes away once you open one of the games below, because a game fixes its own dice. Set your colors first. They stay with you when you pick a game.
• One tap instead of a grip. ROLL rolls everything. On a computer the space bar does the same, and so does the R key. There is no cup to shake, no dice to scoop up afterwards, and no fine motor control involved at any point.
• Nothing lands on the floor. Dice on a screen cannot be knocked off the table, cannot roll under a chair, and cannot go missing between sessions. For anyone who would rather not be bending down after a stray die, that alone changes the evening.
• Fullscreen. A button below the dice fills the whole screen with them and hides everything else. That is useful on a laptop wired to a big monitor, and on a tablet passed around a table.
• Up to twelve dice, and you can hold them. Twelve at once is the limit, which covers every game on this page with room to spare. Tap a die to set it aside for the games that need it, like Yahtzee and Farkle.
• Sound, on or off. Each roll plays a dice rattle, a useful cue for anyone who doesn't see well. A toggle turns it off.
• Read aloud. After every roll the result is written onto the page as plain text, so a screen reader announces the numbers without anyone having to describe the table.

Six games at a glance

All six use ordinary six-sided dice, all six scale from a small group to a full room (Bunco is the one that wants whole tables of four), and all six can be learned by watching one round. They are ordered by how quickly you can teach them, easiest first.

Pig: one die, one decision

The easiest game on this page to teach, and the hardest to stop playing. On your turn you roll a single die over and over, adding each number to a running total, and you may stop whenever you like and bank it. Roll a 1 and the turn total is wiped out and the die passes on. First to 100 wins. That is the entire game, and the whole of it is one repeated question: is what you have worth risking for a little more?

It suits a mixed group better than almost anything else, because a player who wants to think about it can, and a player who just wants to keep rolling can too. Full rules, the math of when to stop, and the two-dice version are on the Pig rules page.

Open the table with one die →

Going to Boston: three throws and you're done

Also called Yankee Grab and Newmarket, and about as simple as a scoring game gets. Roll three dice and set the highest one aside. If two dice tie for highest, keep just one of them. Roll the remaining two and set the highest of those aside. Roll the last die. The three dice added together are your score for the round. Everyone takes a turn, the highest score wins the round, and after an agreed number of rounds whoever has won the most rounds wins the game.

Nobody has a decision to make, so it moves fast, it needs no score sheet beyond a tally of rounds won, and a player who joins halfway through has missed nothing. There is a well-known variant, sometimes called Multiplication, where instead of adding all three dice you add the first two and multiply by the third. It's the same game with much bigger numbers, if your group enjoys the arithmetic.

Open the table with three dice →

Shut the Box: good company, and good alone

Nine numbered tiles, two dice. Roll, then flip down any open tiles that add up exactly to your roll: an 8 can be the 8, or 6 + 2, or 5 + 3. Keep rolling until nothing can be made, and whatever tiles are still standing count against you. Shut all nine and you have played a perfect round.

It is on this list because it also works for one person. A resident with an hour to fill and nobody free can play it against their own record, as a great many people do. You do not need the wooden box either. Nine cards, or nine numbers on paper to cross out, work the same. The full rules, the one-die rule that people argue about, and a printable score sheet are on the Shut the Box rules page.

Open the table with two dice →

Bunco: the one for a whole room

If you are running an activity room rather than a card table, Bunco is the game to know. Three dice, six rounds, players in teams of two at tables of four. In round one you are rolling for 1s, in round two for 2s, and so on up to 6s; each die showing the target number scores a point, and rolling three of them is a Bunco. There are no decisions to make at any point in the entire game, which is why it works: skill never separates the table, so a first-timer and a twenty-year regular have the same evening.

It also scales. Twelve players at three tables is traditional, but any number of full tables of four is a complete game, right down to one table. Players shuffle between rounds, so everyone ends up sitting with everyone. Budget about two hours. The rounds, the scoring, the bell and printable score sheets are on the Bunco rules page.

Open the table with three dice →

Yahtzee: the one everybody already knows

Five dice, three rolls a turn, thirteen boxes to fill. The advantage of Yahtzee in a group of older adults is that most people have played it before, often for decades, and the rules come back within a turn or two. The score sheet also helps: it holds the whole state of the game, so nobody has to keep anything in their head between turns.

On screen, tap the dice you want to keep and roll the rest, twice per turn, exactly as you would with your hands. It also plays properly as a solo game: thirteen turns against your own best is a real game. Scoring, the bonus, and a free printable sheet are on the Yahtzee rules page.

Open the table with five dice →

Farkle: for the ones who like a gamble

Six dice, and a race to 10,000 points. You roll, set aside anything that scores, and choose whether to bank what you have or roll the rest for more. Roll nothing scoring and the whole turn is gone. That's a farkle. It is Pig with more to track and much bigger numbers, and it suits a table that enjoys egging each other on.

It is the most arithmetic-heavy game on the page, so it suits a group that likes that, and the printable score sheet keeps track of the running totals. The full scoring table, hot dice and the common variants are on the Farkle (10,000) rules page.

Open the table with six dice →

Three more you can teach in a minute

These three don't need a page of their own, because the rules fit in a paragraph each. All of them are folk games with no publisher and no official rulebook, so house rules differ from town to town. Agree on your version before the first roll.

Round the Clock

Two dice, any number of players, no score sheet. The goal is to roll every number from 1 to 12, in order. For the numbers up to 6 you may use either die on its own or the two added together: needing a 5, you succeed on a die showing 5, or on 3 + 2, or on 4 + 1. From 7 upward you need the total of both dice. Each player gets one roll per turn, and if it isn't the number you need, the dice pass on. First player to complete 12 wins.

One roll per turn is what makes it work in a group: nobody holds the dice for long, everyone is watching the same roll, and a player can step away for a cup of tea and pick it straight back up.

Sevens Out

Two dice and a piece of paper. Roll the two dice and call out the total. Roll again and add it on, calling the running tally each time. Doubles are worth double their face value: two 4s make 8, so they score 16. You go on rolling until you throw a 7, and the moment you do, your turn ends and the tally you had reached is written down as your score. Play until somebody reaches an agreed target; 500 makes a comfortable length.

The gentle part is that the 7 ends the turn but doesn't take your points away, so nobody spends a turn building something up and walks away with nothing. It has no decisions at all, which makes it a good game to run alongside a conversation.

Aces in the Pot

Two dice, and two chips per player (coins, buttons, poker chips, anything). Take turns rolling both dice. For each 1 you roll, put one of your chips into the pot in the middle. For each 6, pass one of your chips to the player on your left. Two 1s means two chips into the pot; two 6s means two chips to your left. Every other number means nothing at all.

Lose your last chip and you sit out, but you are not eliminated, because the moment somebody on your right rolls a 6 you are back in. When one player is left holding the final chip, they roll three times and must avoid throwing a 6. Manage it and they take the pot and win. Throw a 6 and the chip and the dice pass to the next player, who tries the same three rolls, and so on until somebody survives.

It is the best-natured game on this page. Nobody is ever out for good, the whole thing is decided by chips traveling around the table, and it is the natural game to reach for when the group is bigger than one table but smaller than a Bunco night.

Open the table with two dice →

LCR and Tenzi: what our dice can't do

These two come up every time somebody asks for easy dice games, and it is worth being straight about both.

LCR is played with three special dice whose faces read L, C and R, with a dot on the other three sides. Our dice show numbers and pips, and cannot be given letters, so we cannot give you an LCR set. LCR has always been playable with three ordinary dice, though, using the substitution most rule sheets give: read a 4 as Left, a 5 as Center and a 6 as Right, while 1, 2 and 3 mean you keep that chip. Everyone starts with three chips, and the rule that is easy to miss is that you roll one die for each chip you hold, up to three, so a player down to a single chip rolls a single die. Each die you roll tells you to pass one chip left, pass one chip right, or put one in the center pot. A player with no chips left doesn't roll, but is not out: chips keep coming around the table, and the moment one lands on them they are back in. The last player still holding a chip wins and takes the pot. It works, but it asks every player to translate three numbers in their head on every roll, which makes an easy game tiring. If that would bother your group, use Aces in the Pot instead: the same chips and the same passing, with nothing to translate.

Tenzi is out of reach for a different reason. Every player needs ten dice of their own, and everybody rolls at the same time, racing to get all ten showing the same number. Our table holds twelve dice in total, not twelve each, so even a two-player game would need twenty. Tenzi needs real dice, and a set of them is inexpensive.

Score sheets to print

Most of the games above only need somewhere to write a number down each round, so here are two blank sheets that cover all of them. The first keeps a running total for three players, which is what you want for Pig, Farkle, Sevens Out or anything else played to a target score. The second is a plain round-by-round tally for four players with the biggest boxes we can give it (one number per box, nothing else on the page), which suits Going to Boston, Round the Clock and Shut the Box.

Click the button to print just the sheets; the rest of this page is left out. If the printed text is still smaller than you want, your browser's print dialog has a Scale setting under "More settings". Set it to 150% and the same sheet comes out in large print on the same single page.

Real dice, cups and tactile sets

A screen is not the right answer for everyone, and there is plenty of physical equipment for when it isn't: oversized foam and wooden dice, braille and tactile dice with raised pips you can read by touch, lidded shaker cups and felt-lined trays that keep dice on the table, and grip aids for hands that find a small cube awkward. We don't sell any of it and don't know which brand is best. A specialist low-vision supplier or an occupational-therapy catalog is where to look, and an occupational therapist will know what suits a particular pair of hands. If you want to know what all the other shapes are for while you're there, the page on types of dice runs through them.