Yahtzee

For as long as i can remember we have always had a yahtzee game in our house, and now that i've left home i have bought my own - its a game i've always really enjoyed playing, either with someone or even just on my own.

So, what is Yahtzee? Yahtzee is a dice game which is now owned by Hasbro, but was originally made by Milton Bradley going back as far as 1956! The object of the game is to score the most points by rolling five dice to make one of thirteen combinations. Each combination has a different points value - some are fixed and others are the sum of the dice added together.

Yahtzee is split into two tiers - the upper tier and lower tier. The upper tier has six combinations which are as follows:
One's
Two's
Three's
Four's
Five's
Sixes

The idea is to roll the dice (in each turn you get three rolls) and save as many of each dice as you can - for example if on your first roll you have three 2's, a 5 and a 4 you would save the three 2's and roll the other two dice again and try and get some more 2's. If when you have completed the upper tier you have reached 63 points (the total of the dice from ones to sixes) you will receive a 35 point bonus.

The lower tier has seven combinations which are as follows:
Three of a kind - you need at least three dice the same and you score the sum of all five dice - for example three 5's, a 2 and a 6 would give you a total of 23.

Four of a kind - as with the last combination but this time you need four of the same dice - eg four 4's and a 3 would give you a total of 19.

Full House - for this combination you need three of a kind and a pair - eg three 6's and two 1's. This scores you 25.

Small Straight - you need a sequence of four dice - either 1 2 3 4, 2 3 4 5 or 3 4 5 6. This will score you 30 points.

Large Straight - you need a sequence of all five dice - eg 1 2 3 4 5 or 2 3 4 5 6 and this will score you 40 points.

Yahtzee - To get a yahtzee you need all five dice the same. For this you get 50 points. If you manage to get a second yahtzee you will get a bonus of 100 points!

Chance - this is where you can have any dice, for example if you haven't got any of the combinations you can put it on chance, its like a free go.

If you are playing with other people, whoever gets the highest total wins! However if you are playing alone, there is a solitaire version of the game where you need to try and reach the highest possible score of 375 if all combinations are met with the highest scores (of course it will be higher if you get multiple yahtzee's)

The "board" game comes with a plastic cup, the five dice, a tray roll the dice in, pencils and a scoring pad.

There is now an electronic version of the game, its a little hand held game so you can play it anywhere! I've played it in the car when travelling, even at work when i've been bored!!

I love this game, i think it is a really addictive game and i really like now how there is the electronic version which is the one i have at home. I also really like how you can't actually be good at this game, it is a game of complete luck so quite often someone different will win most times you play it!!