EmberDice: Bank or Burn is on the App Store — free, with no ads, no coins, no account. Six dice and one decision, over and over: take what’s on the table, or feed a die to the fire for a shot at more.
How it plays
Each turn you roll six dice — tap Roll, or just shake the phone. Everything showing is yours if you bank it. That’s the safe play, and it ends your turn.
The other play is Push. Tap the dice you want to keep — kept dice are safe — then push: the fire takes one of your un-kept dice at random, gone for the rest of the turn, and the survivors reroll. You have to keep at least one die before you push, so every push shrinks your table. Push twice on a greedy turn and you’re down to three dice, hoping they come up sixes.
Pushing pays off just often enough to be a problem.
First to 50 takes the round, and rounds build a best-of-five match. Play solo and race to 50 in as few turns as you can, pass the phone to somebody across the table, or play the computer — which you can rename. Mine is called Skyler.
The leaderboard remembers
Every match goes on the record — who beat whom, by how many rounds, with a Sweep badge for a 3–0. Solo runs rank by fewest turns to 50. Rivalries carry across launches, which is exactly how rivalries should work.
For the commute
EmberDice is free on the App Store. If you enjoy it, there’s a tip jar behind the heart — no paywall, no ads, ever.
And if a push-your-luck dice game sounds right for a train or a bus — short turns, one hand, no connection needed — its sibling is cut from the same cloth: Cascade: Dice & Card Duel. I consider them both great commuter games.
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