Shut the box

Shut the box is a dice game traditionally played with a wooden counting box holding hinged or sliding tiles numbered one through nine, though it can also be played with only dice, a pen and paper. Its history is unconfirmed: some accounts trace it to twelfth century Normandy, while a 1976 source instead credits Napoleonic-era origins and notes a revival in British pubs from the 1960s onward, with the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey also named as possible sources. A single round can be played solo or by a small group of two to four players in turn. On each turn a player rolls the dice and closes, or shuts, one or more open tiles whose numbers sum to the roll, continuing until no legal combination of open tiles remains. That player's score is the total of whatever tiles are still open; closing every tile before running out of moves wins the round outright. Because each roll narrows the arithmetic options available, the game rewards careful mental sums as much as luck of the dice.