Knucklebones

Riffle Shuffle & Roll: How to Play Knucklebones:

The Dice Game from CULT of the LAMB!
Materials and Setup

To play Knuckle Bones, you will need a set of nine six-sided dice for each
player, and it would be best to have some way to denote the three
columns in which players are adding their dice.

How to Play

Gameplay is simple. On a player's turn, they will roll one die, and then
they will place that result in one of the three columns. Each player can
have at most three of their dice in one column. There are two nice little
hooks to this game that all of the strategy or the tactical decision-making
will stem from.

Special Rules

First, at the end of the game, each die will be worth the total value of the
pips. So right now, this die is worth two points for the blue player.
However, if there is more than one die of the same value in a column, the
value of that die is doubled. So now, each of these are worth four. And
you probably guessed that if there are three dice of the same value in a
column, then the value of each die is tripled. So these would be worth six
each instead of two.

The other hook that contributes to the strategy in gameplay is that once a
player places a die in a column and the opponent has dice with the same
value on their side, their opponent's dice are removed. So here, if the
white player added their two to this column, the blue player would
immediately remove any two. And that is it. Once a player adds their final
die to their layout, the game is over, and you'll tally up your score.

Play-through

To begin, choose a player who will go first. You can roll for it, with the high
number going first. Let's just say blue is going to go first. They roll, they
get a three, and they place their three. White player takes their turn. They
also get a three, so they choose to attack right away, forcing blue to
remove their die.

Blue rolls a five and places it. White also places a five, and they're going
to be a bully and force blue to remove. Now blue is behind two dice.

One thing that should be noted is that if there are more than one dice in a
column and one has to be removed, so let's say the five is here, what
happens in the video game is once that five is removed, all the die or dice
next to it slides to fill that empty space. You don't have to do that. I believe
it just helps with the player recognizing where the open spaces are,
instead of having these open gaps throughout the layout. Just one thing to
keep in mind.

So, blue takes their turn. They roll a two. They're going to go ahead and
play this here. White rolls a three. They're going to take a chance and
place the three here, getting that double point action, hoping blue doesn't
roll a three. And they did. So, let go ahead and place that here. These two
dice are removed. Slide that five up. Again, you don't have to. It just helps
with keeping the layout orderly.

White rolls another five. They're going to go ahead and spread out the
points and put that five in the middle column. Blue rolls a two. They'll
stack the two over here. White rolls a six. They'll play the six here. Blue
rolls a three. They're going to go ahead and spread that out too. White
rolls a one. Blue rolls a one. They'll go ahead and attack.

So white rolled a three. They have a couple options. They can remove,
empty the middle completely, or take it out over here in the far column,
which I think that's what they're going to do.

Blue rolls a five. That's bad news for white. I think they'll play it here in the
middle. Another one. So they could place it here and kill off this one, but
that is not very helpful. It's only one point loss for them, and then that
would mean that the white player has jammed up this column. They've
removed any hope for a double. So, they're going to go ahead and just
place it here in the middle.

We got a six from blue, and they're in the same situation. They could jam
up this row and make them remove their six, or they could spread it out
hoping for a double. I think in this instance, they're going to go ahead and
put the six in this far column and hope for another six to come up after this
column has been filled.

White rolls a five. That's exactly what they're going to do. They're going to
put the five here. They could force this five to be removed, but they're
going to go for the double points.

Blue rolls a five. They could be mean here, but that would end their
column and any chances of double points. They could put it here and run
the risk of having fives removed later on. This is kind of a tough choice.
Let's go ahead and place it here.

White rolls a one, so they'll go for the double ones there. Blue rolls a
three, and they want to keep this column locked down, so they'll go ahead
and just place the three over here. White rolls a one. They'll go for triple
ones, why not?

And let's, blue is down to one die, so this will end the game. They roll a
five. Seeing as how this is the last die and there's only one place for them
to put it, they put it in that spot, forcing their opponent to remove their two
fives. One last punch below the belt before the game ends.

End Game and Scoring

All nine dice have been placed for blue, so that ends the round
immediately. White does not get a chance to place their final dice, and
now it's time to tally up the score. So, as I mentioned earlier, you will just
add up the value of the dice, including any double or triple values for
having those combos in the column.

So White's pretty easy to add up here. 3, 6, 9 plus 3 is 12, plus 6 is 18.

They obviously lost, but just for the sake of tutorial ising here, let's go
ahead. We got 4, 8, plus 3 is 11. And then we got, uh, plus 10 is 21, plus
10 is 31, plus 3 is 34, plus 6 is 40, 45, 46. So it's a pretty big difference in
score there, and that's how to play Knuckle Bones.

Conclusion

Now, as I said at the beginning of the video, you can find really, really nice
wooden boards on Etsy for this game. It's developed its own sort of
following as a game in itself, and I always find it interesting when fully-
fledged video games have really good mini-games within them. And this is
one that I think could easily be one of those games from 100 years ago
that just uses dice and chips or a wooden board, like Marble Solitaire or
any of the many number of strategy games that have no theme
whatsoever. Also, as I said at the beginning of the video, this thing is
simple enough to teach in less than a minute and play through in just a
few minutes, especially once you have the overall strategy down.