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How to Play House of Fire

I learned House of Fire from one of my best friends in high school – her family LOVED to play this game because it’s super simple to learn and you can play with anywhere from 2-50ish people (they used to host big game nights playing this game with tons of tables set up).

Yesterday, my mom sent my girls over the score sheet and then they played together through our Facebook Portal.

It’s the perfect game to play during isolation, either in person or via technology.

house of fire

Here’s how to play House of Fire:

Each player will need:

  • 2 dice
  • A piece of paper and pencil or pen

(Note: you can play this as a team game – one person rolls the dice and the other draws)

The goal of House of Fire is to build a complete house and have 6 children before your opponent does

Each player gets ready with their 2 dice and their paper and pencil.

When you’re ready, both players start rolling their dice at the same time, as quickly as they can.

When you roll a 1: Draw a simple house on your paper

When you roll a 2: Draw a window

When you roll a second 2: Draw a second window

When you roll a 3: Draw a door

When you roll a 4: Draw a chimney

When you roll a 5: Draw smoke coming out of the chimney

When you roll a 6: Draw a child (just a tally mark is sufficient!). Repeat this last step until you have 6 children.

You must get each number in order before you can go on to the next one. So you can’t draw a chimney until you have successfully done a 1, two 2s, a 3, and a 4.

If at any point you roll two 5s together, your house burns down and you start completely over (doesn’t matter if you have a complete house and four children or if you’ve only drawn a house and one window).

You CAN do multiple things in a single roll, so if you roll a 1 and a 2, you can draw your house and add your first window.

The person who successfully completes their house and populates it with 6 children is the winner.

If you’re playing this in a big group, you put out a bell and when an individual or team completes their house, they run to the bell, ring it and everyone stops immediately. Each individual or team tallies up their points (1 point for each completed piece – house, windows (each 1 point), door, chimney, each child, etc). The first team to get to 50 points (or whatever point level you choose) wins.

If you’d like the cheat sheet that shows what each number is for, you can grab a printable copy below – just pop in your email address and it’ll come right to your inbox!

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8 Comments

  1. Thank you so much for this!!! We had a virtual game night with some friends and were both like, uhhh what games can we play?? Then I saw this one come up and it was a big hit!! Thanks for being you. You’re one of the few people I still follow religiously, Instagram, blog, and Facebook. Haha. Not in a weird way though! Just thank you for all of you!

  2. Can you add your dice to get the number you need or do you have to have the number needed on one di?

  3. Do you know of any similar games. I am a teacher and doing remote learning for social hour with a group of kids and this was super fun.

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