Balut Dice Game Rules

You need five dice, a shaker cup and a Balut score sheet for every player. Bring a pencil as well, because there is a lot to write down.

The sheet has seven rows, one per category, and four boxes running across each row. That comes to 28 boxes, and a game lasts exactly 28 rounds. Two more columns sit on the right: one for the dice total of the row, one for the points that row is worth at the end.

Two to six players works, and four or five is what you usually find around a Balut table. Playing on your own is fine too, if you want to see how many points you can put together.

Whoever has the most points wins. Your dice total is only a step on the way there.

Start your turn by rolling all five dice. Set aside whatever you want to keep, throw the rest again, and repeat once more. Three rolls in all, and you may stop after the first or the second if what you have is good enough. Dice you set aside can be picked up and thrown again while rolls remain.

When the rolling is done, the result goes into one open box. The category is your choice, and a box that has been filled stays as it is.

Some turns fit nowhere, and a box still has to be used. You cross one out and write a zero in it. Over 28 rounds that will happen more than once.

Settle who opens the first round with a single roll each. After that the player with the highest dice total in the previous round leads the next one, and play moves clockwise. The game ends when every player has filled all 28 boxes.

All seven categories are open from round one, and each of them has to be filled four times.

Ones, twos and threes get no row of their own. They only count when they form part of a straight, a full house, a choice or a balut.

So a roll of 6-6-6-4-4 can go down as 18 in sixes, 8 in fours, 26 in the full house row or 26 in choice. In the three remaining rows it is worth nothing.

Roll five of a kind and you call Balut across the table before you write it in. Five ones are worth 25 and five sixes 50, and either one counts as a single balut when the points are worked out.

Filling a category once does not close it. Every row holds four boxes, and it is the total of all four that decides whether the row pays.

A turn might run like this. The opening roll shows 6, 6, 3, 2 and 1. Both sixes stay, the other three go back in, and up come 6, 4 and 1. The third six is kept and the last two dice give 6 and 2. That leaves 6, 6, 6, 6 and 2 on the table: 24 in sixes, or 26 in choice. You take the sixes.

Later on the rest of the row fills up with 18, 24 and 18. The row comes to 24 + 18 + 24 + 18 = 84, and sixes need 78 to pay. A weak box early in the game can be made good later, as long as boxes remain in that row.

A box you crossed out stays in the row as a zero. Three decent sixes and one blank give 24 + 18 + 24 + 0 = 66, and the row is beyond saving.

The order is entirely up to you. Nothing stops you filling the whole choice row in the first four rounds, but that spends your cheap boxes straight away.

Once the sheets are full, each player adds up the four boxes in every row. Those row totals become points according to this table:

Straights and full houses pay all or nothing. Every one of the four boxes must hold a real straight or a real full house, so a single blank wipes out the whole payment. The balut row has no total to reach and simply pays for each balut you actually rolled.

Then all 28 boxes are added into one dice total, which is worth an adjustment of its own:

The table is built around the 350 to 399 band, where the adjustment is nothing, so a dice total in that range is an ordinary evening. The highest total the sheet allows is 812, and 29 points is the ceiling for one game.

Here is one player's sheet after 28 rounds:

A dice total of 480 falls in the 450 to 499 band and adds 2 more points, so the sheet is worth 12.

The fours row landed on 52 exactly. The expensive mistake is the blank in the straight row: it costs the 4 points for the category, and the 20 pips a large straight would have added would also have pushed the dice total to 500 and the adjustment from 2 up to 3. That one box was worth 5 of the 29 points in the game.

The player with the most points wins, and no further sums are needed. The dice total has already done its work in the table, so a player on 480 pips can comfortably lose to one on 430 who collected more category points along the way.

Nothing in the rules covers two players finishing level on points. Letting the higher dice total settle it is the simplest fix, but agree on that before the first roll.

Clubs play Balut as a match over several games and add the points up as they go. The short scale makes that sensible: 29 is the most anyone can score in one game, and a single game rarely separates the table.

The game grew up in bars and clubs, where the traditional stake is that the loser buys the next round. At home a pile of chips does the job, and with children at the table chips are the only sensible answer anyway.

These rules follow the 1979 standard version: five dice, seven categories and four boxes in each. Category points come from 52 in fours, 65 in fives, 78 in sixes, all four straights, all four full houses, 100 in choice and 2 for every balut, with the dice total adjustment added on top. The Singapore club version with only seven boxes and the jackpot variant are described under variants.