A common mix-up
Pig or Pass the Pigs
Sort out the differences between the old folk dice game and the modern contest with rubber swine.
There is an old dice game called Pig, played with one die and no equipment worth the name. It is not this. The two get confused constantly, partly because both are press-your-luck games about deciding when to stop.
| Pass the Pigs | Pig, the dice game | |
|---|---|---|
| What you roll | Two rubber pigs | One ordinary six-sided die |
| How many outcomes | Six landings per pig, none equally likely | Six faces, all equally likely |
| Ends your turn | A Pig Out, roughly one roll in five | Rolling a one, one roll in six |
| Worst case | An Oinker sends your whole score back to zero | You lose the turn, nothing more |
| Target | 100 points | Usually 100 points |
| Who publishes it | Winning Moves Games USA | Nobody. It is a folk game with no owner |
What the dice game is
Roll one die, add it to a running total, stop whenever you like. Roll a one and the turn is worth nothing. First to a hundred wins. That is the entire game, and it has been taught in maths classes for decades because the odds are easy to work out on paper.
What makes the pigs different
Nobody can compute the pigs from first principles. The chance of each landing has to be measured by rolling, which makes the same decision genuinely harder and a good deal funnier to watch.
The pigs also carry a punishment the dice game has no equivalent for. A single landing can take away not just your turn but everything you have scored all evening.
If you arrived looking for the one-die game, you now have its rules in full: they fit in a sentence. If you came for the pigs, everything else on this site is about them.
Carry on from here
- Every edition, side by sideCompare every box released over the years, laid out neatly in a side by side table.
- From Pig Mania to Pass the PigsFollow the journey of our odd tabletop pastime, from its original name to the current classic box.
- The game in a probability lessonSee why math teachers love borrowing two rubber pigs to demonstrate risk and chance to their students.