How to Play the Midnight Dice Game

We have a great dice game for you today: Midnight Dice. This shouldn’t be confused with the 1990’s Midnight Roll dice game. (We’ll cover this one in an upcoming post, sign up for our newsletter to get notified when it comes out.)

The Midnight Dice Game is a luck and light strategy game that has similarity to the dice games HEARTS, Straight Golf and  Run For It. It also goes by the names 1-4-24 and 2-4-24 (see below for this variation).

In this post, we’ll cover what you need for Midnight Dice, how to play, the rules, game variations and how to win.

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What you Need for Midnight Dice

You will need 6 dice and a score sheet. If you need some new dice, we love to play with everyone having their own set in their favorite colour, shop here; Canadians, here.

How to Play Midnight Dice

The object of the Midnight dice game is to score the most points possible. The twist is that you must roll a one and a four to score.

On your turn, you will roll all 6 dice. Now, you can choose to keep any of the dice you’d like but you must keep at least one. next, you then reroll the rest of the dice and again. You may keep any of the dice you’d like but you must keep at least one. This process is repeated until all the dice are in the kept pile.

Now it’s time to get to the scoring. First, if you don’t have a 1 and a 4 in your keep pile, then you score 0 points for the round.

The dice are passed to the next player. On the other hand, if you have the 1 and the 4, you add the rest of the dice together. That is your score. The 1 and 4 do not count towards the score. For example, if you have a keep pile of 1, 4, 3, 5, 6, 6 then your score would be 20 points. Any other 1s or 4s would count in the score. For example if the kept pile is 1,4 1, 4, 5, 5 your score is 15.

Winning

The first player to reach the agreed upon amount is the winner.

2-4 Midnight Variation

In this variation, players need to roll a 2 and a 4 before they can score. the rest of the game is played the same. Of course, you can also but in the condition that a 1 and a 2 (to make 12) are the numbers to be rolled before scoring. That one makes the most sense to me as midnight is 12 o’clock.

Ring in the Fun

The Midnight dice game is fast and easy but still fun to play. It would make a great game to play on New Year’s Eve.

For more dice fun, check out the games Chicago, Come on Six and Piñata dice. Also be sure to visit our Family Game Shelf shop to find tons of fun with seasonal and original games like our dice mini golf game Whacky Putt, it might be more fun than game night can handle.