Yahtzee

Yahtzee, sometimes Yatzee without the h, is certainly one of the most famous dice game. It is played with 5 dice and the goal is to make as many points as possible by judiciously filling your score sheet.

Game rules

One play in turn each after the other. At your turn, after having rolled the 5 dice for the first time, you can decide to roll again one, more or even all of your dice to improve your hand. When you are satisfied, or when you have exhausted the three rolls you are allowed to do at maximum, you must choose a row on your score sheet to put your points in.

The points you get depends on the combination you managed to obtain with your dice, and the row you chose. In general, you get 0 points if you didn't success in making the required combination for your selected row. Sometimes, you are obliged to select a row knowing that you will mark 0 because you have no other choice, or simply because some of the combinations are very difficult to have and you wish to protect some other rows. It's especially with the Yahtzee category. Each row is only used once, you aren't allowed to come back to an already marked row. A game is therefore composed of exactly 13 turns, after which the 13 rows of the sheet are full.

Score sheet and combinations

Your score sheet is composed of two main parts :

A bonus of 35 points is given if the total score obtained in the upper part of the sheet (groups 1 to 6) is greater or equal than 63 points. These 63 points corresponds to 3+6+9+12+15+18, what is equivalent to say that to get the bonus, you must have got at least three dice of the correct value for each of the groups. An interesting strategy is to try to sacrify or compense weaknesses in smaller groups (1 or 2), which anyway never give many points, by better successes in greater groups (4, 5 and 6).

Variants

Additionnal rows in score sheets

This variant adds three rows in the score sheets, making a game last for a total of 16 turns unstead of 13 :

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