Farkle Rules: How to Play, Setup, and Scoring

Farkle rules are simple to state and surprisingly deep to play well: roll six dice, bank what scores, and decide every turn whether to stop or push your luck for more. This page covers the standard 10,000-point scoring game that most households and office breakrooms mean when they say “Farkle,” and calls out the handful of house rules that change from table to table.

How to play Farkle: the rules in a nutshell

This hub describes the 10,000-point version of Farkle: a 500-point threshold to open your score, hot dice when all six dice have scored, and a final round once someone crosses the target. Farkle has no governing body and no single official scoring table, so where the two published rule sets this page cites disagree, both values are given rather than one being passed off as the only way to play.

Setup

Farkle needs nothing but six six-sided dice and a way to keep score. Give each player a line on a score sheet (or a column on a sheet of paper), decide a turn order, and you’re ready to start. There’s no board, no hands to deal, and no limit on players beyond how long everyone is willing to wait between turns — three to six players is the sweet spot, since turns run faster with fewer people at the table. If you’d rather not track running totals by hand, this site’s free, printable Farkle score sheet adds up each player’s rounds and a grand total for you.

Agree before you start on two things that vary by group: whether you’re using the 500-point opening threshold (below), and which scoring table you’re using for the less common combinations like three pairs and straights. Settling those up front avoids an argument mid-game.

How a turn works

On your turn, roll all six dice. Look at what you rolled and set aside any dice that form a scoring combination — the full list is in the scoring table below, but the basics are single 1s and 5s, and three or more of any face. Every die you don’t set aside gets re-rolled; you can also choose to re-roll dice you already set aside if you think you can do better, though almost nobody does once points are locked in.

Keep rolling the remaining dice and adding to your turn total until one of three things happens. First, you can stop and bank: add your turn’s points to your running score and pass the dice to the next player. Second, you can roll into a Farkle: if a roll comes up with no scoring dice in it at all, your turn ends immediately and you lose every point you earned this turn — your running total from previous turns is untouched, but this turn’s points are gone. Third, you can hit hot dice: if every one of the six dice has scored, either in one roll or cumulatively across this turn’s re-rolls, you get to roll all six again with nothing set aside, keeping your turn’s points live and at risk for another round.

The diagram below walks through one full turn: an opening roll, the dice set aside versus the one re-rolled, the hot dice moment once all six dice have scored, and the decision between banking and rolling on.

Getting on the board: the 500-point threshold

Before you can record any score at all, most tables require your first scoring turn to total at least 500 points. Fall short of 500 on a turn and you still have to decide whether to bank below the threshold (which earns nothing) or roll on and risk a Farkle for nothing gained. Once you’ve opened your score with a 500-plus turn, every later turn counts from the first point — the threshold only applies to that first entry.

Plenty of groups skip this rule entirely and let any turn’s points count from the start of the game. It speeds up the early turns, at the cost of losing the one deliberate risk/reward decision the opening rule creates. Say up front which version you’re using; it changes early strategy more than almost any other house rule.

Scoring

Every scoring combination has to appear within a single roll — you can’t combine a 1 you set aside two rolls ago with a 1 from this roll to make a pair.

Single 1s and 5s and the three-of-a-kind values are the same everywhere. Everything built on top of them is not: the two rule sets this page cites, Farkle.games and Dice Game Depot, publish different scores for the straight, for three pairs and for the big multiples. The table gives both, so you can see which table your group is actually playing, with the other values you are likely to meet in the last column.

Combination	Farkle.games	Dice Game Depot	Other values you will meet
Single 1	100	100	—
Single 5	50	50	—
Three 1s	1,000	1,000	300, at tables that treat three 1s like any other triple
Three 2s	200	200	—
Three 3s	300	300	—
Three 4s	400	400	—
Three 5s	500	500	—
Three 6s	600	600	—
Four of a kind	Double the triple (four 4s = 800)	Double the triple	1,000 flat, or four times the triple
Five of a kind	Triple the triple (five 4s = 1,200)	Triple the triple	2,000 flat, or six times the triple
Six of a kind	Four times the triple (six 4s = 1,600)	Four times the triple	3,000 flat, or eight times the triple
Straight (1-2-3-4-5-6)	1,000	3,000	1,200, 1,500, 2,000 or 2,500
Three pairs	750	1,500	500, 600 or 1,000; some tables don’t score it at all
Two triplets (two different three-of-a-kinds)	2,500	2,500	—
Four of a kind plus a pair	Not listed separately	Scored as three pairs, 1,500	The triple’s value plus 250

The three-of-a-kind row is the one to memorize first, because both published tables build four, five and six of a kind straight off it by multiplying. Note that three 1s jumps to 1,000 — a bigger leap than the 100-per-triple step every other number follows — which is exactly why some tables flatten it to a plain 300 instead, so a run of 1s doesn’t overshadow every other combination on the sheet. The flat 1,000 / 2,000 / 3,000 set in the last column is the other common way to score the multiples, and it is the one many commercial sets print.

If a roll of all six dice scores nothing — no 1s, no 5s, no triple or better — that’s a Farkle, and the turn ends with none of that turn’s points banked.

How the game ends

Players take turns until someone banks a running total of 10,000 points or more. That doesn’t end the game immediately: it triggers the final round, in which every other player gets exactly one more turn to try to beat that total. Once everyone has had their last turn, whoever has the highest score wins — so the player who reaches 10,000 first doesn’t automatically win if someone after them rolls better in the final round.

This final-round rule is what keeps Farkle from being decided the instant someone crosses the line, and it’s also where hot dice and Farkle risk matter most: a player chasing the leader in the final round has every reason to push a hot-dice streak further than they normally would.

Common variations and house rules

Beyond the scoring-table variants already noted above, groups differ on a handful of other points. Some drop the 500-point opening threshold so every turn counts from the first point. Many play without the three-Farkle penalty at all, treating three bad rolls in a row as bad luck rather than an additional 1,000-point deduction. Others cap how many times you can roll on with hot dice in a single turn, so one lucky streak can’t single-handedly decide the game.

Farkle sits comfortably alongside other press-your-luck and set-collection games in a game night rotation. If your group likes the escalating risk of deciding when to stop, you’ll find a similar tension in backgammon, where doubling the stakes mid-game forces the same kind of nerve; players who prefer calmer, pattern-matching turns tend to gravitate toward dominoes instead. Both are worth having on hand for the nights when six dice and a scorepad aren’t quite the mood.