Alphabet Pig

An all reader game by Tony Reeves

Approximately 20 turns

The game of Pig is an excellent little game based on balancing risk against scoring using 3 dice. I bought a small boxed version for my wife as a stocking filler this Christmas.

Three dice are thrown and are totalled to give a score UNLESS one or more of the dice show a "1" (="Pig").

The player can stick or continue to throw the dice and improve the aggregate score BUT :

If one "pig" appears the turn ends and the other 2 dice do not contribute to the score.

If two "pigs" appear the turn ends and the TURN score becomes ZERO.

If three "pigs" appear the turn ends and the AGGREGATE score becomes zero.

The first player to reach a specified number of points (often 101) wins.

Other variants involve throwing more or fewer dice. The variant given by Alan Parr in "What's Your Game?" uses only one dice and causes the score to reset to zero on a throw of "1".

Whilst I am perfectly willing to run "Pig" as a postal game it struck me that a combination of these rules with a By Popular Demand idea might be fun.

My young daughter has an alphabet jigsaw. The players' task is to determine which objects have been selected by the publishers to represent each letter.

Each round players submit a number of guesses using any letter(s) of the alphabet. If that list contains one or zero errors then the player scores a number of points for the round equal to the number of correct guesses. If the list contains two errors then their score for the round is zero. If the list contains 3 or more errors then that player's cumulative score is reduced to zero. Players guesses will NOT be published until the end of the game, the feedback each turn will consist of publishing each player's round score and cumulative score. The winner is the player in the lead when a cumulative score of 100 is exceeded OR the first player to score 26 in a round (ie every letter guessed correctly!) whichever comes first.