Play Balut - Beginners Start Here

Balut game is an interesting dice game that you'll absolutely love when you get involved with it. It doesn't involve any hard rules and it can be played during one's spare time, break, during the weekend, or whatever time you can devote to play a few games.

A Brief History

An american soldier stationed in Cebu in the Philippines invented the game. He was playing poker and lacked cards and then... I don't really know how he formed it but it was named poker dice by the same soldier. In early 1970s, a guy who visited the Philippines frequently got to know about the game. He was a Dane, Niels by name. He learnt how to play plker dice and then named it Balut when he was introducing it to his people in Thailand. The game underwent several changes after other people modified and improved it successively.

What is the Objective?

There are 28 rounds in Balut. This number, 28, was gotten by multiplying the number of times you have to score (4) in each category (7 categories). The aim of the player is to score as many points as possible in each round. There is a certain amount of score a player must have in each category. I'm talking about a requirement in each category. You will only be awarded points once you meet that category's requirement but there is one exception.

That exception is the "choice" category which I'll get to in a minute.

Start Rolling the Dice

The player has five die which he can roll. After ehich he'll have the choice of either re-rolling or scoring the current roll. A re-roll can be done a maximum of two times, which brings the total number of allowed rolls to three, after which you must score the roll. In the initial roll, all the dice must be rolled. But in subsequent rolls (which only happens if you want to re-roll), you can roll any single dice or roll all. All you have to do is select the ones you want to re-roll and throw the dice.

Continue scoring each rolls till the scorecard is filled up (i.e all 4 fields in each and every category have been filled). When that has been completed, that would be the end of the game.

Categories Explained

This is better done with an example. For example, you threw the dice and you got a 6, 6, 1, 4, and 6:

Sixes: Only the sixes dice are counted so your score would be 6*3=18

Fives: Since you didn't get a "5", your score would be zero in this category.

Fours: You got a "4" so your score would be 4*1=4

Straights: If your dice contains all the numbers from 1 through 5 in any order (e.g 2, 4, 3, 1, 5), then you got a small straight (score would be 2+4+3+1+5=15). If it contains the all the numbers from 2 through 6, then it's a big straight and the score would be calculated likewise.

Full House: Just like in poker, you need a pair and three of a kind in this category. The total eyes on all dice is your score.

Choice: You can roll anything here and the total eyes will be calculated and added to your score.

Balut: you must have five of a kind. E.g 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 (score would be 5*the dominant number - in this case, 1; which yields a total score of 5.

Conclusion

Obviously, you can't learn everything about balut from a simple article like this. I wrote this article to help those interested get started. I love this dice game a lot and I believe you will too.