Liars Dice

[Picaroon Lagoon]

Bootstrap Bill: “Wondering how it’s played?”
Will Turner: “I understand. It’s a game of deception.”

Anyone play Liars Dice (AKA Pirate’s Dice)?

 

[Picaroon Lagoon]

“Wondering how it’s played?”

This is perhaps the best video for exploring the game, how it’s played, and its place in the POTC universe. And ye need not buy (or pillage) the boxed set pictured above to play! All ye be need’n be two opaque cups, 10 dice (5 per player), yerself and another. That be the minimum to get a game goin’… O’course ye can always add more players so long as each has their own cup and dice.

 

[Grey Roger]

I used to be in a tabletop gaming club. We played all sorts of things, both RPG and board games. And we played Liars Dice. We had a big bag of dice and plenty of cups, so we could have quite a few players - we could probably have accommodated the crew of the Interceptor.

We played the variant in which value of dice takes precedence over number of dice. That was to reduce the chances of a player escalating to a near immediate challenge by declaring something like seven 2's, meaning the next player would have to declare at least eight of something and probably be challenged. In this version, three 3's would be a valid raise on seven 2's, meaning if someone wanted to escalate immediately, the bid would need to be a lot of 6's.

The other variant we played was "exacts". You know, of course, that if someone bids seven 2's for example, and you call "Liar", the dice are all revealed and the bidder loses a die if there are not at least seven 2's showing; if there are at least seven of them, you lose a die. If you call "exacts", the dice are all revealed and if there are exactly seven 2's - no more, no less - then everyone except you loses a die; if there are any other number of 2's, you lose a die. It's a high risk, high reward move but can be worth it if there are a lot of players.

One player would sometimes bid without looking at his own dice. This was generally regarded as brave, even reckless. But in fact, if there are a lot of players, your own dice are almost irrelevant, you're playing the averages, and so I started doing it as well.

And sometimes, if I either had a lot of 4's or was claiming to have them, I'd make the inevitable "Star Wars" pun, such as "I'm strong with the Fours".