Yahtzee

This post was imported from Playing with Games, an old gaming blog that I co-wrote with Megan. The authorship and formatting might be mixed up. If you spot any issues, please let me know.

Yahtzee is a bit like Poker but uses dice. It is a game where Probability is either on your side or not on your side.

Materials

5 dice
pen and paper

Set-Up On your piece of paper, draw a chart that lists the “hands” of dice down the left side and the players’ names across the top. The “hands” of dice, and the amount of points that each is worth, are:

1s - sum of all 1s
2s - sum of all 2s
3s - sum of all 3s
4s - sum of all 4s
5s - sum of all 5s
6s - sum of all 6s
3 of a Kind - sum of the three matching numbers
4 of a Kind - sum of the four matching numbers
Full House (3 of a Kind and a Pair) - 25 points
Short Straight (4 in a row) - 30 points
Long Straight (5 in a row) - 40 points
Chance - sum of all dice
Yahtzee - 50 points

Game Play On your turn, roll the dice up to three times. You first roll all five of the dice. Then, you may choose which dice you would like to re-roll - if you want to re-roll any - and roll them. You then have one last chance to re-roll any of the dice. After your third roll (or after you’ve decided to stop rolling), you must score your roll as one of the above hands. Add your score to the chart in the appropriate spot. Then the next player rolls up to three times and scores his/her roll as one of the hands. The game is over when the chart is full, i.e. when each player has a score for each hand.

Notes

If there is no spot to score your roll that earns points, you must fill in a zero for one of the hands (your choice).
If you have successfully scored a yahtzee, i.e. you scored a yahtzee for 50 points and did not previously put a zero in for that hand, additional yahtzees receive a bonus of 100 points (write +100 under your column and do not fill in a score for a hand).
Parker and I prefer this rule for additional yahtzees: for every additional yahtzee, erase any one score entry and replace it with the maximum possible score for that hand.

Parker’s record for “Number of Yahtzees Scored in One Game” is four. Probability was on his side…

Published: Jun 1, 2012 @ 00:00.
Last Modified: May 8, 2026 @ 19:26.

Yahtzee

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