Dice Week Day 3: Midnight
Dice Week Day 3: Midnight
Rolling and rerolling dice with Midnight (1-4-24)
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This post is part of the Dice Week series! Be sure to check out all five parts: Part 1: Pig, Part 2: Liar’s Dice, Part 3: Midnight, Part 4: Ship, Captain, and Crew, Part 5: Crown and Anchor.
Dice Week continues! We’ve looked at Pig and Liar’s Dice so far.
Today we are looking at a game called Midnight!
But first…
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Dice Week
This week is a series of five posts, each exploring a different dice game. The goal is to get some inspiration to use dice in a different way in your next game design. The side benefit is that you might find a new dice game that is fun to play on its own!
The third game is Midnight!
Midnight
I wasn’t able to confirm the origins of this game, but it does seem to be a popular one to play in bars. It also seems to be commonly called 1-4-24, which isn’t nearly as catchy of a name. Betting with actual money is also common.
It has some Yahtzee-adjacent re-rolling mechanisms that might be interesting.
How to play
To play you’ll need six six-sided dice (6d6). Then starting with the first player:
The player rolls all 6d6 dice.
The player must keep at least one of the dice, and then reroll the rest.
At the end of the rolls, they must have a 1 and a 4:
If they don’t have a 1 and a 4, they score zero for the turn.
Otherwise they add up the remaining 4d6 dice and the sum is the score (max. 1,4, 6+6+6+6 = 24 points).
The player with the highest 4d6 total at the end is the winner. Ties result in just playing again until someone wins.
Variations
I wasn’t able to find many variations or alternate rules for this game:
2-4-24: Players must keep a 2 and a 4 (instead of a 1 and 4) to be able to score. This doesn’t really change the game.
If you’ve played this with different rules or an interesting twist, please share in the comments!
Probability
BruteForce ran a simulation of 1-4-24 to determine the frequency of each score, based on simple strategy rules. Good advice if playing in person:
If you roll a 1 or 4, keep them if you don’t already have them.
If you roll a 6, keep it if you already have both a 1 and a 4.
If, based on the previous rules, you didn’t keep anything, then keep the highest available die.
The Midnight Game page on Wikipedia also has a discussion of strategy and scoring probability. According to this, you have a 41.8% chance of getting both a 1 and a 4 on your first 6d6 roll.
Ideas & inspiration
So how could we use this in game designs? Here are a few ways:
Cyberpunk hacking: Like any Yahtzee-style reroll / push your luck system, I think this could work as a hacking mechanism. The requirement to get two very specific dice face values could be thematically tied to ICE breaking. The resulting 4d6 score could work as the amount of data stolen.
Magic system: At the risk of being too similar to the Pig suggestion, this could be used to power up spell casting. Each spell could have it’s required components (i.e. 1 and 4) and the rest are optional. The resulting 4d6 score could be the power of the spell. Failure to get a 1 and 4 would result in the spell failing to work. The number of required face values could be adjusted up or down to change the difficulty.
Final victory points: In a board game, this could be spread out over the course of the game. Might be interesting that at the end of each of the six rounds you’d roll the remaining dice and keep one. Failure to get the 1 and 4 would mean you either didn’t score those points at all, or perhaps reduce bonus points. Thematically it might be hard to tie into the game.
My two cautions with this are (1) Yahtzee reroll system can really slow down a game and (2) sometimes you just get bad rolls which can be frustrating.
Conclusion
Some things to think about:
Yahtzee style reroll systems are flexible. It’s a mechanism that has been modified in countless ways, and effectively used in many board games. Dice Throne (Chantellier & Trembley, 2018) successfully took that basic idea and made it into an exceptionally fun game.
Magic systems can do anything. No matter the mechanism, I always feel it could be used for a TTRPG magic system. It’s a fun area to explore and experiment.
Look for games you can play in a bar. Bars can be loud, and not the easiest place to play a game. If the game can survive there, it’s probably simple and requires limited communication. Those kinds of game can sometimes be turned into interesting subsystems for other games.
Dice Week continues tomorrow! See you then!
— E.P. 💀
P.S. Assuming you use a mm/dd/yy date system, 1-4-24 is right around the corner! A perfect day to play a game of Midnight!
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