By Brad Cook
“Let’s play the yacht game!” friends of a wealthy Canadian couple used to declare whenever coming aboard the pair’s luxury vessel. The popularity of “the yacht game” eventually led to entrepreneur Edwin Lowe selling sets of it during the late 1950s, and today we know it as Yahtzee. Now you can play it in a format that would have surely driven that long-ago couple’s friends green with envy.
Yahtzee seems simple at first: merely roll five dice three times and put together the best combination possible. But after each roll, you must decide which dice to keep and which to roll again, in the hope of putting together a combination that scores the most points. The format is similar to poker, allowing you to assemble three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind, a full house (a set of three and a set of two), and other combinations. Five-of-a-kind is known as a Yahtzee, and it earns 50 points, the highest possible.
Strategy comes into play, however, as you decide what type of combination to go for during each set of three rolls. (You can stop after one or two rolls if you already have the combination you want.) You must fit the final result into one of the available combinations, and each combination can only be used once. For example, if you have three fours set aside after two rolls and you’ve already put together three-of-a-kind and a full house, then you’ll need two fours on the last roll to pull off a Yahtzee. If you can’t do it, you won’t earn any points for that round.
Variants on a Classic
Yahtzee on the iPod offers a twist on the traditional game by introducing a “rainbow rules” option. In this one, you also roll red and blue dice, giving you the ability to create combinations based on color, such as two pairs of the same color or a standard full house where all of the dice are the same color. Since each die you roll randomly comes out white, red, or blue, this is a variant that’s possible only in the digital realm.
You can play classic and rainbow rules solo, against a friend by passing your iPod back and forth, or against the computer, with three levels of difficulty available. A third gameplay variant, “duplicate rules,” is two-player (against a human or the computer) only — it opens each turn by rolling 15 dice and challenging you and your opponent to put together the best combinations possible from just those results.
No matter which gameplay option you choose, competitive Yahtzee matches end after each player has put together all of the possible combinations. The winner is the one with the most points. The game tracks your historical best scores in all three modes, as well as the awards you’ve won, such as racking up 400 points in rainbow rules or rolling ten Yahtzees during your career.
Yahtzee may not be strictly relegated to yacht play anymore, but you could say it’s found a new home on another type of luxury vessel.
From Yacht to iPod: A History of Yahtzee
That wealthy Canadian couple — whose names seem to be lost in the mists of time — approached Edwin Lowe to create sets of their “yacht game” for friends because he had made his initial fortune as a seller of Bingo games during the 1920s. In exchange for the first 1,000 sets he produced, the couple gave Lowe the rights to their creation, which bore a resemblance to other dice games that had been around for many years.
Lowe, who felt that “Yahtzee” was a better name than “The Yacht Game,” struggled in his initial attempts to sell the new product, whose complex rules were difficult to describe in an ad. He decided to invite potential customers to Yahtzee parties, where they could enjoy the game firsthand. Those Yahtzee players soon began telling their friends about the fun they had, and sales eventually gained traction.
The Milton Bradley Company bought Lowe’s business in 1973, gaining the rights to Yahtzee with it. Milton Bradley says that 50 million Yahtzee games are sold each year, with an estimated 100 million regular players. The company has introduced its own variants, such as Triple Yahtzee and Showdown Yahtzee, over the years, along with versions of the game for Mac and PC. Now with an iPod edition available, you can slip Yahtzee in your pocket and take it anywhere.
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- Site: Yahtzee
- Publisher: Apple Inc.
- Developer: Electronic Arts
- Genre: Cards, Casino, & Board Games
More iPod Games
System Requirements
- Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or Windows 2000
- iPod nano (3rd and 4th generation only), iPod classic, or iPod (5th generation only). Not playable on your computer, other iPod models, iPod touch or iPhone. Please check which iPod model you have.
- iTunes 7.5 or higher required to download (games cannot be played in iTunes)