About 15 years ago I played this in high school and I can't remember enough about it to play again. Even google.com isn't giving me any good hits, though at least its results were porn-free.

We used something like 5 six sided dice (aka 'dice' to the non geeks of the world), and when it was your turn you accumulated points each time you rolled. However, if you made a 'bad' roll, you lost everything built up that turn. So it basically boiled down to how far you wanted to push your luck. The 'little' details I can't remember are what gave you points and what was required to avoid rolling a "rat's ass".

Simple, but I thought it was fun. I'm not sure where we heard of it - maybe it's known by other names more commonly.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

I think I've played that game. I didn't know it was called rat's ass, though. And I don't remember what the specific rules are. But I know what you're talking about.

Have you tried just looking for rules for dice games to see if you can find this game under a different name?

Brad Grenz

'rules' was the magic search word. I'd just been trying to filter out all the conjugations of "giving a rat's ass".

This site has a ton of dice game rules, though AOL seems awful at serving pages reliably:
http://hometown.aol.com/dicetalk
There's also a sound file loaded by the main page.

Greed, Farkle, Bupkis and Ten Thousand all have similarities to the game I remember. There was also a minimum score required to open that I had forgotten.

Thanks, I think we'll try one of these with the kids this weekend.

Tim, you might also be interested in some of these: http://www.cheapass.com/freegames.shtml

Farkle is fun. :)

All kinds of fun in that Cheapass Games stuff. I highly recommend "Ceiling Fan Baseball" because... well, I submitted it.

Farkle, that's the one I'd played.