Rules
On your turn, keep rolling a d6 as many times as you like.
- 2–6 add to your turn total.
- 1 wipes the turn total. Your turn ends (“pigging out”).
- Bank any time to add the turn total to your score and pass.
First player to 100 wins.
History
Pig is a folk game with murky origins, documented in dice-game compendiums for over a century. It’s a fixture of elementary math classrooms because the optimal strategy is genuinely non-trivial - when to bank depends on your score, your opponent’s score, and how much you’ve already accumulated this turn.
The bot here (“Neller Bot”) plays the end race or keep pace policy from Neller & Presser (2004), which is provably within ~0.9% of the game-theoretic optimum:
- If banking now would win → bank.
- If anyone is at 71+ (“endgame”), push hard.
- Otherwise hold at
21 + (leader − me) / 8.
References