Odds Pt. 2

I recently found a game on Facebook called Farkle. It's pretty fun and addicting and actually an interesting application of odds and probability.

Basically you start with 6 dice and roll them all at once. You score points by rolling a 1 or a 5, a three/four/five/six of a kind, three pairs, or a straight. After the initial roll, you take off any of the dice whose score you want to keep and then roll the remaining dice. Once you hit a certain threshhold of points for that set of dice, you can stop rolling or continue to roll and try to score until you're out of dice.

The odds part comes in because if you roll the dice and don't have any scoring dice (i.e. no 1s, no 5s, no three of a kind, no straight) then you have Farkled and you lose all the points for that round. However, if all 6 of your dice score, you get to reroll with a new set of 6 and continue to score for that round. The game lasts 10 rounds as you try to get the highest score possible.

The simple Farkle variation on Facebook is just a high score game, but originally I think it's a multiplayer game as you try to get to 10,000 points the fastest.

It's an interesting application of probability and risk/reward, one which I honestly don't really understand. I kind of just keep rolling as long as I'm "feeling it." But it is a fun game, one I'd suggest everyone who's got some free time to check out.