This month: Stage 1&2 Stage 2&3 Stage 3&4 Stage 5

Game of PIG - Sixes

Game | Teachers' Notes | Solution | Printable page |

Stage: 3 Challenge Level:

There are many variants of the Game of Pig. The simplest and oldest one uses just one die and two players race to reach 100 points. This is the game to start with if you want to analyse the game. Later versions could be said to be generalisations of the one die Pig Game.

In the one die Pig Game, each turn, a player repeatedly rolls a die until either a 1 is rolled or the player holds. At any time during a player's turn, the player is faced with two choices roll or hold.

- If the player rolls a 1 the player scores nothing and it becomes the opponent's turn.

- If the player rolls 2 - 6 the number is added to the player's turn total and the player's turn continues.

- If the player holds the turn total is added to the player's score and it becomes the opponent's turn.

Professor Todd Neller from Gettysburg College, Pensylvania wrote to us:

'I thought you might be interested to know I solved a 1-die variant of Pig and have recently put up a website that allows the user to

(1) play an optimal computer player and receive hints on optimal play,

(2) visualize the optimal policy with animated gifs, VRML, etc., and

(3) explore related sites (such as yours).

The address of this site is:

http://cs.gettysburg.edu/projects/pig/ '