An exciting game of skill and chance!
Yahtzee is an adaptation of a traditional English dice game (Yacht), altered slightly and given a pseudo-Oriental makeover by Milton Bradley. Players roll five dice, trying to get as many matching numbers as possible. If a player succeeds in getting all five dice to match, he gets a "Yahtzee" (called a "Yacht" in the traditional version) and a 50-point bonus. Bonuses are also awarded for poker hand-esque combinations, such as a pair of twos and three threes, making a full house.Various versions with altered gameplay have been released over the years, ranging from Showdown Yahtzee, which added a competitive board game element, to Yahtzee Turbo, a card-based game with a talking electronic "Big Die". A recent variant, Power Yahtzee, includes a red Power Die, which can double or triple a player's score. Yahtzee was also the basis for a short-lived syndicated Game Show with Peter Marshall in the late-1980s; the short-lived 1975 game show Spin-Off (hosted by Jim Lange for Nicholson-Muir on CBS) was like this but with questions, and Family Game Night on Hasbro-owned The Hub featured Yahtzee Bowling.
Not to be confused with Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw.
This game provides examples of:
- Golden Snitch: Getting a second "Yahtzee" after the first (which is already worth 50 points itself) is pretty much a game winner unless the other player also manages to do so as you get a 100 point bonus and can use it as a joker to complete any other scoring dice combination such as the otherwise difficult to acquire "Full Straight" worth 40 points before the bonus. In a game where the absolute maximum score without multiple "Yahtzees" is 375 and the average score is around 250 this is pretty much game over for your opponent 99% of the time.
- Junior Variant: Yahtzee Junior is a variant that replaces the numbers on the dice with popular characters (or various animals for non-licensed versions), with one in particular counting as the player's choice. The scoring sheet also has five of each character in a row, and color-coded tokens are placed on each tile based on what the player rolled.
- Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Yahtzee incorporates this as a core game mechanic. Players roll five dice each round, and if they don't like how they come up, they can re-roll some or all of them up to twice in one turn in attempts to get specific dice combinations.
- Themed Stock Board Game: Yahtzee is starting to get this treatment, with many versions including a custom dice cup shaped like something from the franchise. Versions include American national parks, several sports teams, plus franchises like Back to the Future, A Christmas Story, Doctor Who, Firefly, Futurama, The Hobbit, The Legend of Zelda, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Peanuts, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
- Word Purée Title: Mixing "Yacht" with "Yangtze" to produce "Yahtzee"
