Shepherd's Dice

Shepherd's dice is a popular dice game played by those of the lower classes of Karkovia. Each set has ten dice, eight of one color and two of a different color. The eight dice represent sheep and the two represent sheep dogs. The game is played in turns.
Setup requires some kind of way of separating dice into different piles; cups or boxes drawn with sticks on the ground are popular.
On each player's turn, they roll all ten dice, then total the sheepdog dice. After this, the player may move any number of the sheep dice totalling less than the number on the sheepdog dice to the pen. Then the turn passes. The first player to get all of their sheep into the pen is the winner of the round. Games are typically played best-of-three or best-of-five depending on how bored the players are.

History

Shepherd's dice was, unsurprisingly, created by bored sheep herders about 150 years ago and has been popular ever since.
The game is simple to learn, the pieces are easy to make and store, and the game plays fairly quickly.
Variants include larger numbers of sheep and/or dogs and an unpopular gambling variant based around how many turns it requires to get all the sheep into the pen. (Unpopular because the game is widely perceived as an innocent bit of frivolity - it would be like unto trying to make a gambling version of playing catch in the real world.)
The game also scales up well to larger numbers of players - it isn't uncommon to see four- or five-player games out in sheep fields or on ships where it is sometimes called "fisherman's dice" and the dice represent fish and fishermen.

Components and tools

Ten dice; eight of one color, two of another color, all with the same number of sides.

Related Ethnicities

• Karkovians