Password Potting Shed¶

Gather paper, coloured pens, and a pair of dice. Before the game, write out a simple word list together: one word for each number you can roll, or pair of numbers if you want more variety. Roll the dice five times. Each roll gives you a word. Write your five words in order.

Now here is the real challenge: create a story or a drawing that links the five words together in a sequence you can remember. It does not have to make sense. It just has to stick. When everyone is ready, put the cards away and see who can recite their passphrase from memory first after a few minutes have passed.

The game makes something counterintuitive visible: a five-word passphrase generated by dice is both cryptographically stronger than a short password full of symbols, and considerably easier to remember, because you can hang a story on it. A password like “P@ssw0rd!” is short, hard to remember precisely, and not as strong as it looks. Five words connected by a ridiculous little story stick much more readily.

The method used in the game is called Diceware and it is a real approach to generating secure passphrases. You can take it straight out of the game and use it for your actual passwords: look up Diceware word lists online, roll physical dice, and generate passphrases you will remember without writing them down. A password manager’s master passphrase is the one that still has to be remembered once the manager generates the rest. The game version uses shorter lists to keep it playable, but the principle is identical.

What you need¶

Two dice of different colours, so that a roll reads as a pair rather than a total. Paper and coloured pens.

The word list¶

Roll both dice. One colour gives the row, the other the column. Five rolls, five words.

Every word here is a thing that can be drawn.

Thirty-six words across five rolls give about sixty million combinations. Real Diceware draws from 7776 words, and five rolls of that list give around 28 quintillion, some 470 billion times more.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-08.