Pig (dice game)

Pig is a simple jeopardy dice game first described in print by John Scarne in 1945, though as a folk game it likely predates that publication and circulates today in numerous informal rule variations. Players take turns repeatedly rolling a single six-sided die, adding each roll's value to a running total for that turn, but a roll of one forfeits every point accumulated in the current turn and immediately passes the turn to the next player. A player may instead choose to stop rolling at any point and bank the turn's accumulated points onto their overall score, and the first player to reach a total of 100 or more points across all turns wins the game. Because the central decision on every turn is whether to keep risking an accumulated but not yet banked total for a chance at a bigger gain, Pig is commonly classed among jeopardy dice games, and its simple probability structure has made it a frequently used example in mathematics classrooms for teaching expected value and risk from the middle school level upward. Commercial variants building on the same jeopardy mechanic include Pass the Pigs and Skunk.