How to play Drop Dead

Drop Dead is a traditional dice game with no decisions in it. You roll, you cross your fingers, you roll again. This version opens instantly on your phone, keeps nothing on a server, and never asks you to sign in.

The rules

• Start a round with five dice and a score of 0.
• Tap the dice, or press Enter or Space, to roll every die that is still alive.
• If a roll shows any 2 or any 5, that roll scores nothing, and every die showing a 2 or a 5 is dead. Those dice are greyed out and sit out the rest of the round.
• If a roll shows no 2 and no 5, add the sum of those dice to your round score.
• There is no hold, no pass, no stopping. Keep rolling the survivors until all five dice are dead.
• When the last die dies the round ends and records itself. Higher scores are better.

The primary button tells you where you are: ROLL, then ROLL AGAIN, then NEW GAME once the round is over.

Stats

The game keeps your current and previous score, your all-time best, games played, and a daily play streak — all in your local browser storage, never sent anywhere. A day counts as played on its first roll; consecutive local calendar days extend the streak and a missed day resets it. A round only counts when the last die dies, so starting or abandoning one changes nothing.

Play with friends

Play with friends runs a single-phone game for 2 to 8 players. Sit the phone on the table and point it at whoever is up; that player takes a full Drop Dead round, then a “point the phone” screen waits while you turn it to the next player. Highest score wins the round. Group games are kept entirely separate from your solo stats and streak.

There is no server behind any of this. Share just hands the game link to someone nearby — touch phones together for AirDrop on iPhone or Quick Share on Android — so they can open their own copy. It carries no game state; getting everyone playing is up to the people at the table.

How it was made

The whole game is a single index.html with its CSS and JavaScript inline. No framework, no bundler, no npm install, nothing to compile. It is served as static files, so there is no backend to patch and nothing to fall over. The only network call is a privacy-preserving page-view counter that sees a URL and a timestamp and nothing else; block it and the game plays exactly the same.

It is built to feel like this factory's Shut the Box board — black background, white monospaced type, square outlined pip dice, amber only for the streak — but it shares no code with it.

Drop Dead is built and run through Dark, a Dark Software Factory: a small setup where an AI agent takes an idea from a GitHub issue, plans it, builds it as one focused static project, and stages it for review — no product managers, no meetings, no servers to babysit. Joel writes up how it works in Creating a minimal dark factory.

If you like the game on screen, dice games on Amazon are good on a table. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.