Summary
Cosmic Wimpout is a variation on the dice game Greed, where you roll dice trying to score points by rolling 5’s, 10’s, or triplets. At some point during your turn, you have to decide to press your luck to try for more points or end your turn and score the points you’ve collected thus far. This game adds rules that require you to roll at certain times, often after you’ve scored a bunch of points, thus forcing you to put your current turn point total at risk.

Components
The Cosmic Wimpout game consists of a set of five special six-sided dice. Four are white and one is black. On each die there is a ‘5’, a ‘10’, and special-looking pips showing values of 2, 4, and 6. So that takes care of five of the six sides of each die. The sixth side on all the white dice is a three-pip value, while the sixth side on the black die is a Flaming Sun, which is wild.

Set Up
Find a flat surface on which dice can be rolled to produce a sufficient randomization of the values of the dice. Also determine a player who will keep track of scores, and give that person some paper and a writing instrument. A dice cup is optional, and is not a part of the usual game components, but may be needed for those hands that are too small to shake up five dice at once without sending one dancing across the room.

The Play
To start your turn, you roll all five dice, and separate out any that score. 5’s are worth five points. 10’s are worth ten points. Triplets (called a “flash”) are worth ten times the face value. A Yahtzee roll (all five dice showing the same value – called a “Freight Train”) is worth 100 times the face value (exception: if you roll five 10’s, you’ve rolled too much and you are out of the game). If the wild comes up with any pair, it is added to that pair to form a flash. The wild cannot be used to form a Freight Train. The wild can be used to score a 5 or a 10 provided it is not needed in a flash, or it can be ignored provided that there were points rolled among your other dice.

If you do not score on your initial five dice, you have a “Train Wreck”, and your turn is over. If you score with 5’s and 10’s and no flashes or Freight Trains, you may score those values and end your turn (exception: your first score must be at least 35 points), or you may opt to try to increase your score by rolling the remaining dice and scoring additional points (5’s, 10’s, and flashes) based solely on re-rolling those remaining dice. If you ever choose to roll, and the dice rolled score no points, you have a “Wimpout”: you lose all points you’ve rolled that turn, and your turn is over.

If you ever score with all five of your dice, you must pick up all five dice and roll again, and pray you don’t wimpout. When you re-roll all five dice, keep a tally of the points scored this turn, so you don’t lose track. You only get to add these points to your score if you are able to voluntarily end your turn.

If you ever score a flash, you must roll your remaining dice (or all five if they all have scored), in hopes of scoring again. However, if you roll the value that you just flashed with, that roll is null and void, and you must re-roll the dice just rolled. Thus, it makes it harder to score flashes with 5’s and 10’s as you’ve just eliminated one of those sides from your next dice roll.

If at any roll, you have scored with 5’s and/or 10’s and have some non-scoring dice left over, you may end your turn and score the points you accumulated for that turn.

Turn Summary
1. Roll all five dice.
2. Separate out scored dice. If no dice scored on your latest roll, you score no points this turn, and your turn is over.
3. If all five dice have scored, pick up all five and roll again. If your prior roll had resulted in a flash, your next roll must not include any values from that flash. If it does, you must roll all dice again. Return to Step 2, and remember to keep a tally on the points accumulated for your turn.
4. If your scored dice result in a flash, but you did not score with all five of your dice, you must roll the remaining unscored dice and must score on that roll in order to keep going. If one or more of the re-rolled dice includes the value of the flash just rolled, you must re-roll the re-rolled dice until you do not get any dice showing the flash value. Return to Step 2.
5. If you have some unscored dice left over, decide whether or not you want to roll the unscored dice to try for more points. If you roll again, return to Step 2. If you decide to end your turn, score the points accumulated on your turn thus far.
6. When your turn ends, play passes clockwise.

Game End
Once a person ends their turn with 500 or more points, each player gets one more chance to exceed that player's score. If they succeed, then the person just surpassed gets a chance to exceed the player who just surpassed him. And so on, until no one is able to catch the high-scorer, who is then declared the winner.

Strategy
The biggest strategy is obviously just deciding when to end your turn, when you have that decision. Obviously since you do not have a choice at some times, it can be frustrating to put at risk your accumulated points for that turn. But otherwise, there is no question as to what results score in a dice roll (except perhaps for the wild value), so the strategy comes down to weighing your options against the probabilities of scoring points in your next roll and weighing the need to catch up with your opponents.

Variants
This game is a variant – of the popular dice game Greed. You can obviously soften the rules so as to not to force re-rolls, and the like. Or you can just play Greed. In college I played Greed a lot with regular dice, and it was just as enjoyable, and probably a bit less frustrating. We also played to 1,000 points, and used dice from my Liar’s Dice set, which had a star on one side instead of the one pip, which was a nice touch for this game. One time I scored over 1,000 early in the game, while my opponent Thor had still not scored. Well, he was able to catch me during his turn to take the victory. That son of a gun always had a way of pulling a win out of his you-know-what.

Enjoyment Factor
As a dice game goes, Greed is certainly one of the best, and Cosmic Wimpout provides an interesting change of pace. That's not saying much, as it’s still fairly low on strategy and high on luck, but it can be played with simple components and can be easily understood by the younger set.

Final Ranking
5 out of 10