One Game Holds Five Slots on the Dice Chart
LCR and its dice take five of the top twenty dice game slots. Thirteen of the twenty tie at 4.8 stars, and number fourteen got there on nine ratings.
Loki cheats at everything, and the one game the myths let him win outright is a race he arranged the terms of beforehand. Even then it takes a trick.
Games of pure chance are a different animal. Nobody can cheat them, and nobody can be blamed.
The same game, three times, plus its dice twice
Amazon’s Dice Games chart, node 18702044011, read this morning. Follow one title down the page:
- Number one — LCR, blue tin, 57,435 ratings
- Number eight — LCR, original edition, 4,965 ratings
- Number fourteen — a three-dice “Left Right” set with 36 chips, 7,224 ratings
- Number fifteen — LCR Wild, 9,097 ratings
- Number seventeen — a three-piece “Left Right” wooden dice set, 967 ratings
Five of the top twenty are one game or the dice for playing it, with 79,653 ratings between them.
That is not a ranking of dice games. It is a ranking of listings, and one game has five of them. If you read this chart as “here are the twenty best dice games”, you have really been shown about sixteen.
Thirteen of the twenty are tied at 4.8
The other thing that stops working on this chart is the star rating.
Thirteen of the top twenty sit at exactly 4.8. Three more are at 4.7. The full spread across the whole chart runs from 4.2 to 4.8.
When almost everything ties, the rating has stopped sorting anything. It is a floor, not a ranking — it tells you the category has very few bad products in it, which is true: a dice game is a few dice, some chips and a rule sheet, and there is not much to get wrong.
So neither column is doing the job you want. Rank is distorted by duplicate listings and by whichever tin sold well last week; rating is a thirteen-way tie. What is left is the review count, and it is the only column on this page with any resolution in it.
The number that gives it away
Number fourteen on this chart has nine ratings.
Nine. It is a hero expansion for a bigger dice game, and it is sitting above products with thousands of reviews because a best-seller rank measures recent units in a narrow subcategory — and in a category this small, a handful of sales in a week is enough.
The same effect puts Yahtzee at number six with 232 ratings. Yahtzee is probably the most-played dice game in the English-speaking world. That listing is not new to the world; it is new to Amazon. The rank is measuring the listing’s age, not the game’s standing.
And at number nineteen there is Parcheesi, which is a board game with dice in it — filed here because the tree had to put it somewhere.
What the chart is actually good for
Read for review count rather than rank, it gets useful fast. Only three titles here carry five-figure review counts — LCR at 57,435, Pass the Pigs at 10,960, and Farkle at 13,900 once its two listings are added together. Just behind them sit Parcheesi at 9,606, Yahtzee Jr at 5,337 and The Genius Square at 7,709, and those six together are a genuinely sound shelf for a household.
They also split cleanly by what a table wants:
- No decisions at all — LCR. Everyone can play, nobody can lose badly.
- One decision, repeated — Pass the Pigs, Farkle. Do I roll again or bank what I have? That single question carries an entire evening.
- Actual thinking — The Genius Square. Quiet, two-player, no luck after the roll.
Pick the row, then pick the box. Doing it the other way round is how you end up owning three versions of the same game, which — as this chart shows — is exactly what the category is set up to sell you.
Where these picks came from, honestly
All four read off Amazon’s own Dice Games chart this morning — node 18702044011 — rank, rating and review count together, best-sellers first. All four are research picks. The duplicate-listing count and the tie at 4.8 were tabulated by hand across all twenty rows. Because thirteen products tie at the top rating, nothing here is called “the highest-rated” — on this chart that phrase would be meaningless.
The one honest warning
The duplicate-listing problem is not confined to this chart, and it is the single easiest way to be misled by a best-seller ranking.
When one product occupies several slots, every other product in the category is pushed down by positions it did not lose on merit. A game you would have liked at what looks like number twelve is really at number nine. And the reverse: a chart that appears to offer twenty options is offering fourteen, which quietly narrows what you consider.
The tell is always the title. Read the twenty names before you read the twenty ranks, and count how many are the same thing in different packaging.
One more, specific to this category and to the season: several listings here are Christmas or stocking-filler editions of games that exist year round in a plain box. They are the same game. The seasonal tin sells for a few weeks, climbs the chart on that spike, and is often the more expensive way to buy exactly what is in the ordinary one.
The picks
LCR Left Center Right dice game, tin
Number one, 4.8 stars across **57,435 ratings — more than five times the review count of any other game in the top twenty.** Three dice, three chips each, and no decisions at all: you roll, you pass a chip left, right or to the centre, and the last person holding a chip wins.
- Best for
- Big mixed groups, ages five to ninety at the same table, family gatherings where nobody wants to learn rules.
- Watch out
- There is genuinely no skill in it. That is the design, not a flaw — but anyone who wants to feel they played well rather than that they were present will be bored by round three.
Pass the Pigs
Number four, 4.8 stars across 10,960 ratings, and in print for about fifty years. Two small rubber pigs thrown instead of dice; you score by the position they land in, and you choose when to stop rolling before you lose the round's points.
- Best for
- Two players up, travel, pubs, and anyone who wants a push-your-luck decision rather than pure chance.
- Watch out
- The scoring positions take a few rounds to learn and the card is essential until they stick. Small rubber pigs are also exactly the size that goes missing under a sofa and, for very young children, exactly the size that should not be at the table unsupervised.
Farkle dice game with score sheets
Number ten, 4.8 stars across 4,444 ratings — and Farkle appears again just outside this top twenty, at twenty-one, with 9,456 more. Six dice, a scoring table, and the same push-your-luck question as Pass the Pigs with more arithmetic in it.
- Best for
- Families with children old enough to add up, and anyone who wants one box that plays with two people or eight.
- Watch out
- It is a public-domain game, so a dozen sellers publish near-identical versions and the quality of the dice and the score pad is the only real difference. Buy for the components, and expect to run out of score sheets long before you run out of interest.
The Genius Square
Number eleven, 4.8 stars across 7,717 ratings. Two dice-and-grid puzzle boards played head to head: you roll seven dice, place blockers where they say, then race to fill the rest of the grid with nine shapes. Every roll has at least one solution, which is the clever part.
- Best for
- Two players, one child and one adult on genuinely level terms, and quiet solo play.
- Watch out
- It is a spatial puzzle wearing a dice game's clothes. If the table wants a social game with chat and chips, this is the wrong box — it goes quiet while people think.
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