Description

This is a bluffing game that's especially popular in some Swedish student circles. After poker dice were introduced in the late 19th century it may have evolved from the similar game Mia to using five dice and poker hand combinations. It's usually played using poker dice, although normal dice can be used just as well. There's no real upper bound to the number of players except for practical considerations.

The first player to start a round rolls five dice in a cup, looks at them and names a scoring combination. These include five of a kind, four of a kind, full house, straight ("big" or "small"), three of a kind, two pairs, and one pair; aces beat kings and so on; if a combination doesn't include all five dice, then the best die among the remainder is also named (e.g. "aces and tens, king high").

The next player in a clockwise direction, receiving the cup, must then decide whether she believes the claim. If not, she lifts the cup to expose the dice underneath. If she accepts the claim, she must then aim to produce a higher combination (or at least make the next player think she has); to this end she may redistribute the dice between the cup and the table and then reroll either the open or the hidden dice before making a new claim.

Once a claim is challenged, if it was a bluff the bluffer loses a life and the caller begins the next round. If the claim was true, the caller loses a life and the next player clockwise starts the next round. Typically players begin with three lives and are out of the game when they are all lost, although it's also possible to have just the one life (especially with lots of players).

There are of course different variant details, procedural conventions and betting systems. One variant might be to have five lives, stake two lives on a call, and allow players to "fold" and end a round at the cost of a single life. A simple betting method is that for each round they remain in the game a player must make a contribution to the pot; the last remaining player takes the pot.