Farkle is push-your-luck at its purest: roll six dice, bank what you can, and decide when to stop before you lose it all. It's simple enough to teach in a minute and tense enough to keep a table hooked for hours.
How to Play Farkle
Farkle is played with six dice and a scoring sheet, and the goal is to be the first player to reach a target score, typically 10,000 points. On your turn, you roll all six dice and set aside any scoring combinations — such as single 1s (100 points) and 5s (50 points), three-of-a-kind (three 1s score 1,000, three of any other number scores 100 times that number), a run of 1-6 (a straight), or three pairs. You can then choose to bank your points and end your turn, or risk it and re-roll the remaining dice to try to add more.
If you roll and none of the dice show a scoring combination, you "Farkle" — you lose all the points accumulated during that turn and play passes to the next player. If you manage to score with all six dice in a single turn (or across re-rolls without ever Farkling), you get "hot dice" and can pick all six back up to keep rolling and stacking points. On RivalPit, every point is earned by making smart calls about when to hold and when to push your luck — there's no cash on the table, just bragging rights and leaderboard points.
The History of Farkle
Dice themselves are among the oldest game objects known to humanity. Archaeologists have found dice-like objects in Mesopotamia and the surrounding region dating back roughly 5,000 years, and early six-sided dice made of bone or clay have also been traced to the ancient Indus Valley. The ancient Greeks and Romans were avid dice players too, using games of chance for both entertainment and gambling in everyday life, which is part of a very long, cross-cultural lineage of dice-scoring games that Farkle ultimately belongs to.
The specific game known as Farkle, however, has a much murkier and more recent past. There's no single documented inventor or exact date of creation — it's best understood as a 20th-century American folk game, passed among families and friend groups with the scoring rules evolving informally over generations, similar to games like Yahtzee's dice-scoring ancestors. Commercial boxed versions of Farkle began appearing on the market from the 1990s onward, which is when the name and a standardized ruleset became widely recognized, but the game itself was already being played casually well before it was ever sold in a box. That folk-game, no-single-owner history is fitting for a game that's really about the dice, the math, and the nerve to know when to stop.
Why Play Farkle on RivalPit
- Free and no download. Farkle runs instantly in your browser.
- Real-time multiplayer. Challenge a friend with a link, or play with a group.
- Points, never money. Earned by playing, never purchased or wagered.
- One of 100+ free games on RivalPit, with new games added every week.
Want more games like this? Check out our roundup of online party games with friends, and see how easy it is to play games online with friends with no download on RivalPit.