Play the Liar Dice Game

Most of our grandkids are at the age where they like to play games with us.

Well . . . there’s the one-year-old that would rather play with his cars and the three-year-old that loves her baby dolls!

Other than that, our grandkids are ready for games!

I love to play dice games with them because this helps them learn their numbers.

Some games also help their arithmetic skills. The Liar Dice Game uses a teeny bit of addition. But not much.

It isn’t hard to learn. The main thing is to be able to bluff!

Here’s how you play it.

Give each player 5 dice and a cup.

Make sure all of the kids know how many dice there are in the game. For example if there are 4 players, then there will be 20 dice. This is important to know!

Everyone puts their dice in their cup, shakes them, and then carefully rolls them on the table keeping them covered with the cup.

Players look at their dice without letting others see them.

The first player will guess how many of one dice were rolled. For example, she would say something like “there are ten twos” meaning that there are ten dice on the table that have the 2 face up.

The player to the left goes next. She has two options. One option is to make a guess that increases either the quantity of the same face value  or keeps the same quantity but increases the face value on the dice.

For instance, the next player could say “either eleven twos” (increasing the quantity of the number of dice that have the 2 face up) or keep the same quantity but increase the face value by saying “there are ten threes’ (increasing the face value of the dice from a two to a three).

In this option, the player HAS to make an increase.

This is where it’s important to know how many dice are in use! You don’t want to say an amount more than the number of dice in play!

And this is where bluffing comes in. If the player is worried that his guess might be wrong, she must act confident. Act like she is right. If she is good at bluffing, she won’t be challenged.

The second option is to challenge that guess. If there is a challenge, everyone uncovers their dice to see how many twos are face up.

If the player who challenged the guess was correct (meaning that there are not ten dice with the 2 face value), the player who made the guess loses that round. The person making a guess must remove one dice from her cup and set it aside. She now plays with only 4 dice.

If the guess was correct, the challenger removes one dice from her cup and sets it aside.

(When you challenge a person’s guess, you are supposed to call that person a liar. That’s where the game gets its name. I don’t like that. So instead, we simple say something like “I challenge that.”)

Now the next round begins. Everybody shakes their dice and rolls them onto the table and covers them with their cup.

The loser begins the next round by making a guess. Play moves to the person on the left. That player can make a guess or challenge the previous player’s guess.

Continue playing rounds until there is only one person with dice left.

If there are two players left with one dice, they roll their dice and the one with the highest number wins.

See? This Liar Dice Game is pretty simple to learn, now isn’t it?

Happy playing!