Shut the Box Online

Shut the Box online is the classic pub dice game, free to play in your browser with nothing to download. You roll two dice, then flip down any combination of numbered tiles that adds up to the roll. Keep going until there's no legal move left. If you get every tile down, you've shut the box.

How to actually win. The tiles aren't equally valuable. The high ones (7, 8 and 9) are the hardest to clear, because once you're down to one die you can't reach them at all. Clear them early, while you still have two dice and a wide range of sums. Beginners tend to burn their low tiles first because those numbers come up more often, and then they're stuck with an 8 they can never make.

When you can split a roll, think ahead. A 9 can be taken as 9, or 5+4, or 6+3, or 7+2. Pick whichever leaves you the most flexible board. Early on, two middle tiles usually beat one high tile. Late in the game, clearing the single highest tile left is almost always right.

Once 7, 8 and 9 are down, most rule sets let you roll a single die. That changes the maths completely. From then on you can only make 1 through 6, so anything left above 6 is dead. Plan for that moment before it arrives.

The game goes by a few other names (close the box, canoga, batten down the hatches) and has been played in British pubs for generations. It's also a good way for kids to practise mental addition without it feeling like homework, and that's a big part of why we put it on the site.

The real odds of shutting the box

We wanted to know how hard a perfect game really is, so we worked it out exactly for the rules this version uses (two dice until the 7, 8 and 9 are all down, then one die). If you pick the best tiles on every single roll, you shut the box in about 7.4% of games. That's roughly one game in thirteen, and the average final score with perfect play is about 11.7. Simple habits, like always taking the biggest tile you can, come out closer to 5.6%. So good decisions get you about a third more perfect games.

With two dice, 7 is the most common roll (1 in 6), followed by 6 and 8 (5 in 36 each). A 2 or a 12 turns up only once in 36 rolls. That's why the 1 and 2 tiles usually take care of themselves late in the game, while the 9 needs a big roll, and big rolls get harder to use as the board thins out.

A sample turn

Say you roll an 8 with every tile open. Taking the 8 on its own is usually right. If you take 5 + 3 instead, the 8 is still standing, which is one more high tile to worry about later. Late in a game the choices narrow. Say you're down to 1, 4 and 9 and you roll a 5. Your only move is 1 + 4, and then you need a 9 from a single die, which can't happen. Most games end something like that, and it's why clearing the big tiles early matters so much when you play Shut the Box online.