How to Play Yahtzee

Yahtzee: five dice, a shaker, and a score sheet. It’s so often the simple things in life that make you happy.

If you’ve never played Yahtzee, you’re in for a treat. If you have played it before, get ready to lose the next few days as you revisit an old friend.

Park the Netflix mini-series binge, put your cell phone down, stop scrolling Instagram and trolling on Twitter (or X if you insist). Yahtzee is five cubes of analogue entertainment from an age when social media was sharing a newspaper with your neighbor.

Are you ready? Let’s roll…

The Rules of the Rolls

Yahtzee is very similar to many dice games, especially poker dice. To play, you need five dice and a pen and paper.

If you buy the Hasbro game, it comes with a pre-printed pad of score sheets.

You can also order Yahtzee score sheets online or simply download and print your own.

Object of the Game

The object of Yahtzee is to score the highest number of points.

You score points by rolling five dice three times, this constitutes one turn and you get 13 turns in a game.

It’s a combination of strategy and luck, a bit like trying to win at online slots.

If you want a long session, you can play several rounds of Yahtzee and total up your score. There’s no limit to the number of players who can play a game.

It’s that simple

How to Play Yahtzee

A single game of Yahtzee consists of 13 rounds.

In each round, a player must try to ‘make’ a single category on the Yahtzee Score Sheet.

Every player can have up to three rolls of five dice to ‘make’ the category.

Each category is a different combination of five dice.

The categories are split into two halves, the upper half and lower half as laid o ton the score sheet, as follows:

Upper Section

Lower Section

If you know how to play poker you’ll recognize a few categories are similar in name and makeup to poker hands.

A key difference between Yahtzee and poker is there is no betting (in the rules anyway) and that every round must count so you can’t fold and wait for another round to play.

A single game is finished when every player has completed all 13 categories on the Yahtzee Score Sheet.

If you fail to ‘make’ a category, you still have to score it.

Bonus Rounds

There is a 35-point bonus, if you score more than 63 in the Upper Section of the Yahtzee Score Sheet.

If you throw a Yahtzee and you have already thrown and scored a Yahtzee, you get an extra 100 points. You must also select another category as well, to ensure all 13 rounds are played out. You get the score from the bonus category as well.

For example: if you hit a second Yahtzee, you get 100 points. You might then choose the Full House category and get another 25 points. A bonus total of 125.

If you throw a Yahtzee and you have already ‘used up’ the Yahtzee category with a score of 0, you do not qualify for the extra 100 point bonus.

In both cases, the second Yahtzee acts as a joker: scoring the full quota of points for the nominated category.

Joker Rules

Forced Joker Rule
In the official rules, you must use your Yahtzee joker on the corresponding section in the Upper Section of the Yahtzee Score Sheet first. If that has already been used, you can choose a category from the Lower Section.

Free Choice Joker Rule
There is an easier version of the rules where the player can decide which category to use. However, the Yahtzee can only be used as a Joker, if the corresponding Upper Section box has already been used.

Original Joker rule
In the original 1956 game rules, an additional Yahtzee could be used only in the Lower Section. This rule was amended in 1961

Yahtzee Strategy

Yahtzee strategy can be fine-tuned by playing the game and getting your head around the odds.

The Upper Section 35-point bonus is definitely worth securing. Try to hit those matching numbers. To get the bonus, you need at least three matching numbers in each category.

Obviously, the Yahtzee is the Golden Goose. As well as the 50-point score, it sets the stage for the 100-point repeat bonus.

Just one of these is worth more points than the Small Straight, the Large Straight, and the Full House combined.

Fundamentally, like playing at the best online poker sites, this is a game about odds.

Yahtzee Odds

We love how betting odds work here at Techopedia and Yahtzee odds work in a similar way.

The perfect Yahtzee score is 1575; it’s the highest possible points total, earned by rolling 13 consecutive Yahtzees.

The probability of rolling a Yahtzee in a single roll is 0.08%.

The probability of rolling a Yahtzee in two rolls is 1.23%.

The probability of rolling a Yahtzee in three rolls is 3.43%.

The odds of rolling a Yahtzee in any single three-roll turn is approximately 4.74%.

A player should expect a Yahtzee roughly every 21 turns.

The odds of rolling four or more Yahtzees in a single game are 1/250.

The chances of rolling 13 in a row are astronomical. Though it’s nothing compared to 52 factorial, it’s still a 1 in 228,325,589,819,893,405 chance.

As a percentage: 0.000000000000000043797%.

If you got 2.1 billion people, rolling the dice every five seconds, it would take 80 years before someone rolled the perfect game.

Not only that, this calculation doesn’t factor in that the Yahtzees would also have to be on each number. Find the utter geekery right here.

The average score for a competent player is around the 250 mark. The highest possible score without a Yahtzee is 301.

The lowest possible score is 5

Yahtzee Variants

Bored of Yahtzee? No worries: here are some popular variations on the theme.

Play Yahtzee Online

If you want to give Yahtzee a test roll, there are plenty of free websites where you can work on your Yahtzee strategy and try your luck against either other online players or the computer.

You can also play the game solitaire-style for a high score.

Here are the links to a few great examples we found:

Yahtzee: A Brief History

Yahtzee first appeared in 1956, when it was patented and manufactured by toy and game entrepreneur Edwin Lowe.

Lowe was introduced to the game by an anonymous Canadian couple who called it The Yacht Game, because they played it with friends on their yacht.

They asked Lowe if he would manufacture some sets that they could give to friends as gifts. Lowes saw the potential in the game and acquired the rights, in exchange for 1,000 gift sets.

Today, Yahtzee is owned by board game giants Hasbro and more than 50 million games are sold every year.

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