## The real Tænkeboks

Tænkeboks is a Danish dice game for at least 2 players. Translated into English it means something like, isolation booth, ponder box or to put one's thinking cap on.

Since the rules of the simplified version are explicitly explained in section 2.0, knowledge of the rules for real Tænkeboks is not really necessary in order to understand the simplified version. They are included in case you have a desire to play real Tænkeboks.

### The basic rules

In the beginning each of the n players participating in the game has four dice each (regular 6-sided ones). All the players roll their dice without showing the result to each other.

A player performs a bid by guessing on how many dice out of the 4·n dice she thinks show the same eyes. A bid can e.g. be 4·3 which means at least 4 dice have to show 3. It is also allowed to simply bid 4·equal which means that there have to be 4 dice which show the same eyes. It could be 1,2,3,4,5, or 6.

The order of the bids is as follows:

m·equal < m·1 < m·2 < m·3 < m·4 < m·5 < m·6 < (m+1)·equal

In other words, "at least three dice showing 4" is less than "four dice showing some equal eyes".

In Tænkeboks all 1's are regarded as jokers, that is a joker can be regarded as possesing any of the eyes 2,3,4,5, or 6. If a player after rolling all her t dice obtains the configuration 1,2,3,...,t the player gets t+1 jokers.

A bid is called present if there are at least that many dice showing equal eyes as announced in the bid.

### A game consists of several rounds

One of the players begins the game by performing a bid. Hereafter all players in turn decide whether to bid up or to call. A call results in all players revealing their dice thus resolving whether the bid which was called upon was present on the table or not. If the bid was present the player who called loses the round otherwise the player who made the bid which was called upon loses the round.

The loser from last round begins the next round and all players except the loser put one of their dice aside. The loser of the game is the player who is the last one to have dice left. Hereby Tænkeboks doesn't determine any winners - only one loser!

Back