Shut the Box Wooden Dice

Nine tiles, two dice, and about ninety seconds a round.

Paid once, with no advertising, no tracking and no in-app purchases — ever. The game you bought is the whole game.

One price, paid once · iPhone, iPad and Mac

No advertising
No tracking
No account
No subscription
No in-app purchases
Plays offline

What it is

Not whether you can make the number — which way you make it

Shut the box has been played on wooden boxes in pubs and at kitchen tables for about four hundred years. A round takes ninety seconds.

You roll two dice and lay down any group of standing tiles that adds up to what you rolled, then you roll again. When a number comes up that you cannot make, the round ends and your score is the sum of the tiles still standing. Low is good.

Zero is perfect, and it is called shutting the box. It is rarer than you might think — under the strongest possible play, a box shuts about once in every ten rounds, and this app will never pretend otherwise.

A throw of seven, three of the ways it can be made. Which one you choose is the whole game.

9tiles, or twelve if you want it harder

2–6players, taking turns with one device

90sa round, near enough

1 in 10rounds shut the box, under perfect play

Six ways to play

One box, six games

Solo

On your own

Nine tiles, and a lower score than the one before.

Pass and play

Two to six people

One round each with one device on the table, then compare.

Golf

Nine rounds or eighteen

Lowest total wins. A quarter of an hour, or an evening.

Duel

A box each

Head to head, first to two rounds.

Missionary

A stock of lives

The worst round of each turn costs one.

Twelve tiles

The longer box

Three more tiles, and a game that asks more of you.

The Shut the Box home screen: Nine tiles, two dice. Lay them all down and you have shut the box. A brass Play button, and links to more ways to play, how to play, and about. — Straight to a round, or out to the other five games.

A round in progress: twenty-one standing, with tiles three, four, six and eight still up and the rest laid down. Two dice show two and six, and the prompt reads eight to make, from a throw of eight. — The number you need is never the puzzle. Which tiles make it is.

The new game screen: on your own or pass and play, a player count from two to six, then Golf with a choice of nine or eighteen rounds, and Missionary with three lives each. — Six games, set up in one screen.

An opponent that plays it properly

You will not out-think the strongest one

Three strengths. The strongest is not a bundle of heuristics: it plays the exact optimal policy, computed by enumerating the whole state space, and it averages 11.02.

The other two are genuinely weaker rather than artificially slowed, so a beginner has somewhere to start.

Help with the arithmetic, not with the game

Never handed the answer

Choose how much assistance you want. At every level, including off, the app tells you the number you are trying to reach — that part is never a puzzle.

What the setting changes is whether tiles that can still take part are distinguished for you. It never enumerates the combinations, because being handed the answer is the end of the game for everyone at the table.

The box on iPad: seventeen standing, with tiles one, three, four and nine up, two dice showing one and four, and the prompt five to make, from a throw of five, set beside the box. — On iPad the controls move beside the box rather than under it, and the box itself keeps its place while you aim at a tile.

It asks you for nothing

Paid once, and then left alone

Nothing is collected, which is why the App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected in every category.

No advertising and no tracking
No account and no sign-in
No subscription, no in-app purchase of any kind
No permission requests
No daily rewards and no streaks
Nothing that interrupts a round

A box, not a screen

Oak, brass and felt

Brass tile faces. Tiles that thunk as they go down. Dice that roll and settle rather than appear. The light on the box moves as you move the device, because a thing sitting on a table catches the light from the room it is in.

Made to be read

VoiceOver and Dynamic Type

VoiceOver names every tile by its number and its state, and announces the roll and the amount still needed. Dynamic Type is honoured to the largest accessibility size, and the box scales independently of the text so it stays playable. No state is carried by colour alone.

The details

What you are buying

Price	One price, bought once. No subscription.
Devices	iPhone, iPad, and Mac (Designed for iPad). Universal purchase.
Requires	iOS and iPadOS 26.5 or later
Language	English
Players	Solo, or two to six passing one device
Game Center	Three achievements and four best-score leaderboards
In-app purchases	None. There is no product, no paywall and no restore flow.
Privacy	Data Not Collected, in every category. No tracking.
Age rating	4+. The dice are movement; nothing is wagered.