Presluc

Presluc is dice — eight-sided, because the world counts that way and always has. Everybody puts the same money in the pot and takes sixty-four tokens, and the tokens are the whole of the game from there.

The rules

A player stakes tokens from his bank and must roll at least once. Every face but the one adds its number to his pile. The one takes the pile entirely and ends his round. He may stop whenever he likes, and what he stops on goes into his bank and is safe; a pile of thirty-two or more banks double. The stake climbs as the game runs — eight tokens for the first four rounds, sixteen for the middle, twenty-four for the last four — so a man who has been quietly careful for twelve rounds still has to put up three times what he was risking at the start. Run out of tokens and you are out, and your money stays in the pot. After sixteen rounds the biggest bank takes it.

The game

Everybody knows the mark is thirty-two. Almost nobody stops there, because the man across the table just banked forty and doubled it. It is fast, loud, played on any surface by anyone, and it is the reason a laborer's week can vanish between the twelfth bell and the fifteenth. Everybody has a system. None of the systems work, because the play that wins is the play that ruins you, and there is no third option.

See also

• Redrym · Galbrae · Gambling · Weights and Measures — why eight