Shut the Box

How to play Shut the Box

Shut the Box is a dice game played on a shallow wooden box with a row of numbered tiles along the front. Every tile starts standing up. The whole aim is to lay them all down, which is where the name comes from: shut the box and you have played a perfect round.

A turn works like this:

1. Roll both dice and add them together.
2. Flip down any tiles that add up to that total. Roll an 8 and you can shut the 8 on its own, or the 5 and the 3, or the 1, the 3 and the 4. Any combination counts as long as those tiles are still standing.
3. Roll again, now working only with the tiles you have left.
4. Your round ends the moment you roll a number that no combination of your remaining tiles can make.

That is the entire game. There is no bluffing, no trading and nothing to memorise, which is why it teaches in about thirty seconds and still holds an adult's attention. The only decision you ever make is which tiles to use when a roll can be made more than one way, and that decision is the whole game.

What "shut the box" means

"Shutting the box" means flipping down every single tile in one round. It is the perfect result and it is genuinely rare, which is exactly why the phrase stuck. On a 12-tile box, even flawless play only manages it around once in every 200 rounds. Most rounds end with a few tiles still standing, and the game is really a contest over how few you can leave.

Scoring: the lowest score wins

This is the part that surprises new players, so it is worth being blunt about it. Your score is the sum of the numbers still standing when your round ends, and the lowest score wins. It is golf scoring. High is bad.

So if you finish with the 2, the 3, the 11 and the 12 still up, you score 28. If you finish with only the 1 up, you score 1. And if you shut every tile, you score 0, the best result possible.

All the tiles added together come to 78 on a 12-tile box, 55 on a 10-tile box and 45 on a 9-tile box. That is the worst you could theoretically score, and it doubles as a quick sense of scale: leaving 20 on a 12-tile box is a strong round.

People sometimes expect to count the points they shut instead. That would give exactly the same winner every time, because the two numbers always add up to the same total, so it is only ever a matter of presentation. The traditional rule counts what is left, and that is what we use here.

For more than one round, the standard format is to play a fixed number of rounds, commonly five, add up each player's leftovers, and let the lowest total take it. Penalty points accumulate, so a single bad round can cost you the set.

9, 10 or 12 tiles: which version should you play?

Boxes come with different numbers of tiles and the difference is enormous, so it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

• 1 to 9 is the traditional size. Two dice can make any number from 2 to 12, so every tile is reachable and shutting the box is a real possibility. This is the friendlier version and the better one for younger players.
• 1 to 10 is a common middle size, usually played the same way.
• 1 to 12 is the version you will mostly meet online. Two dice top out at 12, so the 11 and the 12 can only ever go down on an exact roll or as part of a combination, which makes the box much harder to empty and the scores much higher.

Our game gives you the 9-tile and 12-tile boxes, and it keeps your best score separately for each, because a 12-tile score and a 9-tile score are not comparable numbers.

How many people can play?

You can absolutely play Shut the Box by yourself, and plenty of people do. Solo, the game becomes a personal-best chase: play a round, note your score, try to beat it. It is the format the game gets played in most often online.

With other people, the important thing to understand is that players do not take turns roll by roll. Each player plays one complete round, then hands the box on. That is not just convention, it follows from the rules: your round only ends when you get stuck, so there is no natural point to hand over mid-round, and sharing one set of tiles would mean players shutting each other's numbers.

So a two-player game is two full rounds compared, and a four-player game is four. Everyone plays, then the lowest score wins. Four-player boxes exist as physical objects with a set of tiles on each side, but even those are played one round at a time.

Can you win Shut the Box every time?

No, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is a common search and the honest answer is more useful than a promise. Shut the Box is driven by dice. You choose which tiles to use, but you never choose what you roll, and some rolls simply cannot be made. No strategy makes a round unlosable.

What strategy does do is measurably shift your average. We ran the numbers exactly rather than by guessing, by solving every one of the 4,096 possible tile positions and working out the best play in each. Here is what perfect play is actually worth, as an average score across a round:

Two things fall out of that, and both are useful at a real table.

Get the big numbers down early. The gap between choosing at random and simply always taking the highest tiles available is huge, roughly 14 points on a 12-tile box. High tiles are the ones that are hard to shut later and expensive to be caught holding, so spend your rolls on them while you still have the flexibility.

After that, there is very little left to gain. On a 12-tile box, that one simple rule gets you to 35.4 against perfect play's 35.1. You are within a third of a point of a solved computer. On a 9-tile box there is a bit more room, 12.3 against 11.0, so the smaller box genuinely rewards thinking further ahead.

As for actually shutting the box, with perfect play it happens about once in 10 rounds on a 9-tile box and about once in 210 rounds on a 12-tile box. If you have never shut a 12-tile box, that is why.

One last wrinkle. Playing to score low and playing to shut the box are not the same goal, and they call for different choices. If you are chasing the perfect round, take the single-die option more often than is strictly optimal for your score: on a 12-tile box it lifts your chance of shutting from roughly 1 in 275 to roughly 1 in 210, while very slightly costing you on average.

Variations worth knowing

• The one-die rule. Once every tile you have left is a 6 or lower, you may roll a single die instead of two. This is the standard way to sneak the last few tiles down, and it is on by default here. You can switch it off in the settings.
• Cumulative rounds. Play five rounds and add up your scores, or keep playing until someone's running total passes an agreed number such as 45 or 100, at which point they are out.
• Reading the tiles as a number. A pub variant where leftover tiles are read as digits rather than added, so being left with the 5, 6 and 8 scores 568 instead of 19. It exists mainly to make losing dramatic.
• Other names. The same game turns up as Canoga, Tric-Trac and Batten Down the Hatches, and rules vary a little from region to region.

Where Shut the Box came from

The true origin is not settled. References going back to at least the 19th century point to Normandy and the Channel Islands, where it was popular with sailors and fishermen, and it has been played in that region for a couple of centuries at minimum. A competing account credits 19th-century fur trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company. Timothy Finn, in Pub Games of England, credits a Mr "Chalky" Towbridge with bringing it to the south of England from the Channel Islands in 1958.

What is not in doubt is where it ended up. Shut the Box became a fixture of English pubs, is still played there for stakes, and the wooden box on the bar is the image most people carry of the game.

Is it good for kids? Is it fun for adults?

Both, and for slightly different reasons.

For kids, it is arithmetic that does not feel like arithmetic. Every single turn is an addition problem your child actually wants to solve, and the combination step ("what adds up to 9?") is number-bond practice by stealth. Most children can play from around 6 with a little help, and earlier with a grown-up reading the dice. The 9-tile box is the one to start on, since shutting it is achievable and the win keeps them coming back.

For adults, it holds up because the decisions are real. It looks like pure luck and is not: the difference between careless and careful play is about 14 points a round, which is more than enough to decide a match. Rounds take under a minute, which makes it a natural bar and family-gathering game, and it is one of the few games where a child and an adult can play the same round honestly and the child can win.

It also scales down better than almost anything else. One person and a box is a complete game, which is not true of most things on the shelf.

Common questions