A Blue Star

After writing about Yahtzee strategies last week I got the nostalgic for the old game and wanted to play it once more. I did a quick google search for some score sheets and didn’t find any that look good or printed well, so I made my own but instead of calling it Yahtzee I called it Roll the dice. Not the most inventive name but it works.

You can print your own roll the dice sheets also available in PDF format.

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
-Thomas Jefferson

History of Yahtzee
E.S. Lowe filed Yahtzee as a trademark with the U.S. Patent Office on April 19, 1956. The first commercial usage of the name Yahtzee was a few weeks earlier on April 3. Lowe classified his product as a “Poker Dice Game”.

According to Hasbro, the game was invented in 1954 by an anonymous Canadian couple, who called it “The Yacht Game” because they played it on their yacht with their friends. Two years later they asked toy and game entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe if he would make up some sets to be given as gifts to their friends who enjoyed the game. Lowe perceived the possibility of marketing the game, and acquired the rights to the game from the couple in exchange for 1,000 gift sets. This story is expanded by E.S. Lowe in the 1973 book A Toy is Born. According to Lowe, the game did not initially do well commercially, since the rules and appeal were not easily conveyed in an advertisement. Eventually he had the idea of organizing “Yahtzee parties” where people could play the game and thereby gain a firsthand appreciation for it. The idea was successful, and enthusiasts quickly popularized the game through word of mouth.

However, the overall concept of Yahtzee traces its roots to a number of traditional dice games. Among these are the Puerto Rican game Generala, and the English games of Poker dice and Cheerio. Most notable is the dice game named Yacht which is an English cousin of Generala. This game is fully explained in The Complete Book of Games by Clement Wood and Gloria Goddard (1940). This predecessor is extremely similar to Yahtzee in both name and content.

What you need to play

• A roll the dice score sheet
• 5 dice
• Can be played as a solitaire game or with up to 6 other players.

How to play the game

On each turn, a player gets up to three rolls of the 5 dice. He or she can save any dice that are wanted to complete a category and then re-roll the other dice. After the third roll, the player must find a place to put the score (though he or she can choose to end the turn and score after one or two rolls if desired). If the resulting combination of dice will not fit in any unused scoring category, the player must place a “zero” in one of the unused boxes. Categories may be filled in any order.
After each player has had twelve turns and all the categories on the score sheet have been filled, the scores are totaled, and the player with the highest total wins the game.

Example game play

A player rolls all five dice resulting with the numbers 6, 6, 6, 3, 3. They could score for a full house without any further throws. But if the full house category is already used they would set aside the three 6s and roll the remaining two dice to try and gain a good score for the sixes category. The remaining dice are rolled again and come up as a 4 and 6. The 6 is kept making four of a kind and the remaining die rolled as the last throw. It is a 6 as well making a Yacht (five of a kind) and scores 50 points which ends a very lucky turn. It is common for a player to enter zero for a category and players often use the 1s for this because it is low scoring.

Highest and lowest score

• The maximum score of 375 is achieved by scoring 5×1’s (5pts), 5×2’s (10pts), 5×3’s (15pts), 5×4’s (20pts), 5×5’s (25pts), 5×6’s (30pts), Bonus for top row score equaling or exceeding 63pts (35pts), 3-of-a-kind as 5×6’s (30pts), 4-of-a-kind as 5×6’s (30pts), Full House (25pts), Small Straight (30pts), Long Straight (40pts), Yahtzee (50pts) and Chance as 5×6’s (30pts).
• The lowest possible score is 5. This is achieved by scoring zero in all the top row boxes (and therefore also not getting the bonus), and scoring zero in all the bottom row boxes apart from the chance box. The chance box of course will always have some value. In this case a Yahtzee of 1’s is used to accumulate 5pts. There is no rule that requires a Yahtzee to be scored in the Yahtzee box which would otherwise have incurred a 50pt score.

If you want to know more about Yahtzee strategies and the math behind it you should read Advantage Yahtzee: The Official HandbookVariations of the game

• Double Cameroon is played in much the same way as Yacht but with ten dice. At the end of a player’s turn the dice are divided into two groups of five and are used to score two categories of the player’s choice. Five rounds are played for the ten categories, which are; categories 1 to 6 and a full house score the same as in Yacht. Little Cameroon (a little straight) scores 21 points. Big Cameroon (a big straight) scores 30 points. Five of a kind (Yacht) scores 50 points.

Yahtzee is also available on GameBoy advanced.

Die (plural, Dice) - A die is usually a small six sided cube, made of bone, ivory, or most commonly plastic, that is marked with one to six dotes on each of its faces. The cubed dice have the advantage of being balanced in such a way that any side should have an equal chance up landing face up.

The oldest known dice where probably divining sticks made from twigs that where rounded on one side and flat on the other. These divining dice or sticks where used to tell your future depending on what way the land. Pyramid-shaped dice where found in the royal burial tombs of Ur more then 5,000 years ago. Both four-sided, stick, and cubic dice in both ivory and bone flavors have also been found in Egyptian tombs.

Sometimes a was used instead of dice. A teetotum is a four or six sided top that is spun with your fingers, the sides are marked with numbers or dots so that the number that lands down when the top stops spinning determines the value of the dice. its shape is similar to a dreidel. The teetotum probably originated in Germany during the middles ages and was used to predict the future.

Sometimes in medieval England, dice where thrown on a dice board. The board was divide in to six spaces and a funnel was mounted above the board that the dice where dropped in to it. Instead of using the value found on the dice, they used the value of the squares where the dice landed.

Dice are a essential part of many game, and are needed for everything from Boxing to Yahtzee. A pair of misplaced dice can destroy your plans for the weekend, I know its happened to me many times.

Next time you are stranded without a pair of dice and your guests are already on there way, try printing off a few of these origami paper dice. A little glue or tap and a printer is all you need.

[PDF] [GIF]

[PDF][GIF]

I have heard good things about Does God Play Dice by Ian Stewart it might be worth checking out.