The rules

Everything below is the official ruleset as published by the Mölkky federations, in the order you need it. Where a rule is commonly bent, that is said plainly rather than left out.

Setting up

Stand the twelve pins in a tight block, four rows deep, touching each other:

798

511126

3104

12

The front row (1 and 2) is nearest the throwers and parallel to the throwing line. Measure 3.5 metres from the front pin to the line. On uneven ground, find the flattest patch you can — a formation on a slope collapses under its own weight before anyone has thrown.

The twelve pins has the full layout and the reasoning behind the number placement.

Order of play

Players throw one after another in a fixed order, which does not change during the game. The official rules do not prescribe how the order is chosen; the usual method is a single throw each before the game starts, ordered by result.

Each turn is one throw. You must throw:

• Underarm, with the mölkky swinging below the hand.
• From behind the throwing line, with both feet behind it at the moment of release.
• Without spinning the mölkky end over end deliberately. A natural tumble is fine; a helicopter throw is not.

Overarm throws, sideways throws and stepping over the line all make the throw void — no score, and it counts as a miss.

Scoring

This is the part everyone gets wrong on their first game, so it is worth being exact about it.

One pin falls → you score the number printed on that pin. The 12 alone is twelve points, the biggest single throw available.

Two or more pins fall → you score the number of pins that fell. Not the sum. Knocking over 9, 11 and 12 together scores three.

No pins fall → nothing, and a miss is recorded.

A pin counts as fallen only if it ends up flat on the ground. A pin leaning on another pin, or on the mölkky, is still standing and is set back upright on its own spot.

How Mölkky scoring works goes through this with worked examples, including the cases that cause arguments.

Standing the pins back up

After the throw is scored, every pin that fell is stood back upright exactly where it came to rest. Not back in formation, and not moved to a tidier spot.

This is the rule that makes the game. The block starts tight — a good early throw takes five or six pins — and gradually scatters over several metres, until picking off one specific number is a real shot. A group that quietly re-forms the block after every throw is playing a much duller game.

If a pin ends up on top of another, or leaning against something, stand it as close to where it landed as it can stand on its own.

First throw

Mid-game

Endgame

Reaching exactly fifty

You win by reaching exactly fifty points. A throw that would take you above fifty does not win, and does not simply not count: your score is set back to twenty-five and the game continues.

So a player on 46 needs a 4 and nothing else. A player on 38 has a wide range of safe throws. And a player who has just been knocked back to 25 is often better placed than the one on 49, because they can swing at anything while the leader is fishing for a single specific pin.

Reaching exactly fifty covers the arithmetic properly, including why the penalty is 25 and not zero.

Three misses and you are out

Three consecutive scoreless throws eliminate a player for the rest of the game. Any throw that scores — even one point — resets the count to zero.

A void throw (overarm, over the line) counts as a miss for this purpose.

This is the rule most often softened. With children, or in a game where sitting out for twenty minutes would spoil the afternoon, the usual substitute is that a third miss resets your score to zero and you keep playing. Three misses sets out both versions.

Teams

Teams of two or three players are common and change very little:

• Each team has one score.
• Team members throw in rotation — first thrower of team A, first of team B, second of team A, and so on — and the rotation does not change.
• The three-miss rule applies to the team, not the individual: three scoreless throws in a row by the team as a whole, whoever threw them.

House rules worth knowing

The official ruleset is short and the game absorbs variation well. The three changes most groups make:

Target 25 instead of 50. Halves the game length. The overshoot penalty usually becomes 12 or 15 rather than 25 — the point is that it should be roughly half the target.

Miss reset instead of elimination. A third miss sets your score to zero and you play on. This is the right call with mixed ages.

A shorter throwing line. 3.5 metres is a long way for a small child. Two metres for under-tens, and let them throw from wherever they can reach the formation, is a better game than a strict one nobody enjoys.

What is not worth changing: standing pins back where they land, and the two scoring modes. Those two rules are the game; alter either and you have something flatter.

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