What is that weird dice game all the VTubers are playing?
If you follow the VTuber scene even casually, doubtless you’ve noted that certain trends tend to ripple through the community as a whole every so often — be it something everyone suddenly starts saying, a movie everyone wants to watch with their audience or a game everyone decides to play.
One of the most recent trends in this regard, particularly among the Japanese end of the VTuber community, is a peculiar dice game that appears to primarily be about spelling obscene words in Japanese. It’s called NKO DICE and… well, yes, it is primarily about spelling obscene words in Japanese.
NKO DICE is a dice game with vague similarities to Yahtzee, only with less skill and strategy to it. Each round, you take a handful of five dice and cast them into a bowl, then score points according to the Japanese hiragana which land face-up. You also lose points for every dice you “piss” out of the side of the bowl, so in an attempt to keep your bouncing cubes under control, you’re allowed to “nudge” the bowl a few times before the dice come to a complete rest.
NKO DICE is apparently based on a traditional Japanese dice game called Chinchirorin, which itself is a variation on the three-dice gambling game Cee-lo. Cee-lo is primarily about rolling the “best” combinations of dice in order to beat your opponents and end up with more money than what you started with.
In Cee-lo, the ultimate combination is 4-5-6, which is taken from the game’s original Chinese name Sì-Wŭ-Liù (四五六) — it simply means literally “four, five, six”. In NKO DICE, meanwhile, the ultimate combination is おちんちん (ochinchin), which those who have been studying Duolingo’s secret “After Dark” course will know very well is one of several ways of saying “penis” in Japanese.
おちんちん scores you a whopping 10,000 points; ちんちん (chinchin, “dick”) gets you 3,000 points, おまんこ (omanko, “cunt”) gets you 5,000 points and まんこ (manko, “pussy”) gets you 1,000. There are also a few other winning combinations that will score you points, and successfully forming a word like this allows you an additional roll of the dice. Not only that, if you manage to make multiple words with one roll — a roll of ちんちんこ would allow you to make both “chinchin” (dick) and “chinko” (shit), for example — then you add additional dice to your next roll. If you repeatedly roll the same word, you get a combo bonus.
On top of all this, you get points for the individual characters you roll, as well as multipliers according to any triples you roll. You’ll want to be a bit careful, though; rolling んんん will multiply your score for that roll by minus 3!
Who am I kidding? There’s not really a way of being “careful” in NKO DICE; this is a dice game that is pretty much entirely luck-based — though the “nudge” mechanic does at least allow you a vague chance of disturbing a んんん combo if one looks likely to show up. But then you need two ん characters if you want to score that all-important おちんちん, so is it worth the risk?
NKO DICE has that addictive quality that all gambling dice games tend to have — that’s why they can be so dangerous, kids — but when played solo there’s really not a lot to it. It is very clearly a dice game intended to be enjoyed with friends, sitting around a table and laughing at the rude words you’re rolling completely by chance.
And that’s where its popularity online comes from. The reason why this game has become so popular with VTubers is because it’s a safe way to joke around using offensive language with the community; the chat becomes those friends who are sitting around the table laughing at the rude words. The reason it’s primarily popular with Japanese VTubers should be obvious; there’s a certain barrier to entry for non-Japanese speakers that demands you 1) recognise the hiragana involved and 2) know a selection of obscenities in Japanese.
The game is not, in itself, inherently offensive — its deliberately understated presentation intended to capture the atmosphere of playing dice games in a post-war Japanese gambling hall is surprisingly atmospheric — but it does provide ample opportunity for VTubers to shout “PENIS!” in Japanese at their audiences. And we all know how much people love it when they do that.
Is it worth grabbing for yourself? Unless you’re planning on streaming to an audience literate enough in Japanese to understand what’s going on — or play alongside some real friends who can likewise appreciate the inherent puerile humour — probably not. The game’s “Arcade” mode does track your highest and lowest scores, but with so little opportunity to strategise or affect the outcome, the experience is almost entirely luck-based and thus not all that interesting. In true Steam game tradition, the online leaderboards have very obviously been got at by cheaters, too, so don’t go into this expecting some friendly competition against players from around the world.
Regardless of whether or not NKO DICE is actually a “good game” or not, it’s been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold. It will doubtless disappear as quickly as it appeared — but in the meantime you can at least say you were there for a very strange time in our collective cultural history.
If you want to try it for yourself, you can grab it on Steam.
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