I recently returned from a work trip in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve always enjoyed playing live craps, but I discovered a new fondness for bubble craps, specifically the crapsless variant. If you aren’t familiar with craps in general it’s the famous game where everyone stands around a table and make bets on numbers while one of the players, called The Shooter, rolls the dice.

A lively crowd gathered around a craps table in a casino, with players engaged in the game and a dealer presenting the dice.

A lot of folks shy away from craps because they find the game confusing, but it really isn’t. At its core, it’s just making bets on the outcome of the dice roll, which can be any number between 2 and 12. As there are the most ways (6) out of 36 possible outcomes on two die to make 7, it is the most commonly rolled number. On a regular craps table, the way most people play is on the Pass line. On the pass line, 7 or 11 wins on the first phase of the game or the “come out” roll, while rolling a 2, 3, or 12 loses. Any other number becomes the point. From then on, the goal is to roll the point number again before rolling a 7. That’s it.

So now that you’re a craps expert, crapsless craps is basically the same game except 2, 3, and 11, 12 can also be points. That’s really it. If you roll one of those numbers on the come out, they become the point, and you’re trying to roll the point number again before a 7.

Like I mentioned above though, craps is just making bets on the outcome of the dice roll. So you don’t have to play that way. You can bet on any single number, multiple numbers, all the numbers, or even that all the low numbers or all the high numbers, or all the numbers that are not 7 will roll before a 7 appears (called the ATS bet) which I managed to hit during my business trip on the last night I was there:

Display screen showing a hand pay amount of $3,006.89 for a craps game with betting options for low rolls, high rolls, and 'Roll'em All' on a green background.

Anyway, when I got back home I wanted to play more, just for fun with play money. I looked, and there are different craps games I found online, but no crapsless craps! So I decided I would just write the game myself from scratch using some new frameworks while having an opportunity to test out some different AI tools and development patterns. Whenever I do this kind of stuff, I always have a strong instinct to make whatever I end up making available to other people, free of charge and free of ads or anything like that, just like other tools I’ve built for myself like my 5/3/1 workout program generator or any of the little games I made like Draw! or Lucy’s Adventure (Speaking of Lucy, my dog the game was named after, passed away 2 weeks ago at 16.5 years old 🥲).

A dog sitting in a car, looking happy with its tongue out, next to a red water bottle.
👼

Anyway, I found the domain crapslesscraps.com was unregistered so I registered it then set up an auto deploy pipeline for merges to my master branch in version control to deploy the game there:

Screenshot of the online Crapless Craps game interface showing dice rolling area, betting options, and player bank balance.

So, if you like craps or want to learn more about it by playing online with play money, there is now a crapsless variant available for free at crapslesscraps.com 😊. If you have feedback for me about the game or find a bug, feel free to contact me.