I really love card games and dice games. I enjoying playing the games, but just as much I enjoy analyzing the math of the games.

I was strolling through my local Rite Aid drug store and went to the aisle that has games. A game called For-Get-It caught my eye so I bought it.

For-Get-It is one of those games that are quite difficult to explain but simple to demonstrate. There are 9 dice. The goal is to get as many points as possible. Each of the nine dice has a one pip through five pips as usual, but instead of the six pip, three dice have “For”, three dice have “Get”, and three dice have “It”.

Suppose you roll the nine dice and:

(Get, Get, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5)

The first thing is to always remove the word dice so the two “Get” go out. Next you’d pick the two 4s because they’re worth the most, and remove them, leaving five dice.

Now you roll the five dice, hoping to get more 4s. On each roll you first remove the word dice. If the removed dice spell out For-Get-It then you lose all your accumulated points for that turn. Or you can stop at any time and take your current points (8 right now).

Anyway, the game is surprisingly fun, and extremely difficult to analyze formally. It’s an example of what’s called an early-stopping problem.