Farkle (1930)

Overview

Farkle is a traditional press-your-luck dice game similar to Dix Mille, 5000, Cosmic Wimpout, and other such designs. Players roll five or six dice (depending on which version you play), then remove any dice they want to use for points. They can stop and score the points, or re-roll the remaining dice at the risk of scoring nothing in case the re-rolled dice do not score. Points are scored for specific numbers (1 or 5) or sets of the same number. If all dice have been used to score points, the player can pick up all of the dice and the player can keep going, again at the risk of scoring nothing for the current turn should the rolled dice have no points. The first player to 10,000 wins.

The game originated in the 1930s as reported in Hugo Kastner's Die große Humboldt Enzyklopädie der Würfelspiele (Humboldt 2007, pp. 205-208), but has various joke origin stories, such as that the game was "first played in Iceland by Sir Albert Farkle in the 14th century" or "derived from the Farkleberry tree, a small tree native to Texas with berries that would harden as they dried, after which settlers would carve these berries into the shape of dice".

In 1996, Charlie and Mary Potter, known as "Mr. and Mrs. Farkel", created a copyrighted scoring system and lodged various trademarks, with the scoring system being proprietary to Legendary Games, Inc. Charlie Potter started by selling The Original Pocket Farkel, which they assembled on their dining room table. Over the course of ten years, the packaged game became a commercial hit, then in 2007 Patch Products launched a version of the game spelled Farkle, with both versions of the game being on the market at the same time.