6

At work during lunch break, me and my colleagues often play a game using a cup and poker dice. We use five poker dice, which have the traditional faces (9, 10, jack, queen, king, ace). Contrary to liar's dice, each player does not have a cup and dice. There's only one set. The rules are very much like Mia, but instead of using two regular dice, the five poker dice are used. The rules are roughly as follows:

  1. The first player shakes the cup and looks at the combination under it without revealing it to other players.
  2. This player passes it onto the next player (can be clockwise or counter-clockwise, established before the start of the game) and announces a combination. For example, a pair of kings.
  3. The receiving player may choose to believe this by looking at the dice under the cup (again, covertly) or not believing it by lifting the cup and showing what's under it.
  4. If the receiving player called a bluff and lifted the cup, he/she wins if the shown combination is of a lower value than that called by the passing player. He/she loses if it matches the value or is higher.
  5. If the receiving player accepted, they can do a number of things. They're allowed to take one or more dice from under the cup and roll those openly on the table. Or, place one or more dice from under the cup on the table without changing their value and then shake the cup. They're allowed to look at what's under it before passing it on. If there's dice on the table already, combinations are possible. For example, rolling those on the table in addition to one from under the cup, or placing some on the table from under the cup, putting others back and shaking.
  6. The receiving player, after taking an above action (they don't have to, they may just pass things on without changing the situation) will then pass the cup onto the next player while announcing a new combination. It must be higher than what he/she received. We're then back at step 3.

The combinations used are those from poker: high dice, pair, double pair, low straight, three of a kind, full house, high straight, four of a kind, five of a kind (not really a poker combo but possible with dice). You're allowed to stay with the same combination but of a higher value. So for example, two pair of aces and nines will beat two pair of kings and jacks. A dice not forming the combination can be used as a kicker (there may even be two or three, like in a single pair). In that respect it's like liar's dice, but played more in the style of Mia.

Looking around at dice games I'm not finding anything exactly like this. Mia is the closest in rules. Is there an official name and/or rule set for this game? Is it a commonly played game or did someone cook it up and it got passed onto my colleagues via playing?

1
  • Not sure about an official ruleset, but my family used to play liar's dice with almost exactly these rules you have described, and with one set of 5 dice. Poker dice have the same basic "values" as dice with 1-6 dots, so I would imagine there could be quite a variety of dice styles that would qualify as "Liar's dice".
    – TBowman
    Mar 2, 2018 at 19:36

1 Answer 1

1

You're talking about Liar's Dice, an individual hand variant, which is also covered in the Wikipedia entry you shared:

In "common hand" liar's dice games, each player has a set of dice, all players roll once, and the bids relate to the dice each player can see (their hand) plus all the concealed dice (the other players' hands). In "individual hand" games, there is one set of dice which is passed from player to player.

Spanish and French versions of this game only cover the individual hand variant, as reflected in their own Wikipedia entry:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%B3ker_mentiroso
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_menteur
Spanish rules establish losing when reaching 9 points, as those are the number of letters for the word liar in Spanish: mentiroso. While French rules fixes the losing points up to five (has nothing to do with French word for loser this time, as its menteur).
As it seems to be a game without any official organization behind it, there isn't such a thing as an official ruleset, despite in Spain is very common in universities and seems to exist some tournaments there.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .