Yacht
Five dice and twelve rounds. Each round you roll, keep what you like, reroll the rest up to twice, and then spend one of twelve scoring categories. Every category is used once, so the hand you take it on is the hand you are stuck with. Most points at the end wins.
A round
- You start each round with five dice already rolled.
- Tap any dice you want to keep, then roll again. You get three rolls a round altogether: the one you start with and two more.
- When you are done rolling, take one of the twelve rows on your card. That ends your round.
- Everybody plays their own round at the same time, so nobody waits for a turn. The round turns over when the last player has taken a row.
- You can take a row for nothing. Sometimes that is the right move, and the page asks first so it is never an accident.
The twelve rows
- Ones, Twos, Threes, Fours, Fives and Sixes score the sum of the dice showing that number. Four fives on Fives is 20.
- Full House is three of one number and a pair of another, and scores the sum of all five dice.
- Four of a Kind is four or more of the same number, and scores the sum of those four dice only. The fifth die is not counted.
- Little Straight is 1-2-3-4-5 and scores 30. Big Straight is 2-3-4-5-6 and scores 30. Both are all five dice.
- Choice scores the sum of all five dice, whatever they are.
- Yacht is five of the same number and scores 50, the most any row pays.
- Dice that do not match the row you take score nothing in it. The most anyone can score in a whole game is 297.
This is not Yahtzee
- Yacht is the older game, from 1938, and the differences are real rather than cosmetic.
- There is no bonus row: the top six rows are just six rows, and nothing is added for reaching a total.
- There is no three-of-a-kind row.
- Four of a Kind scores four dice here, not all five, and Full House scores the dice rather than a fixed amount.
- Both straights are five dice long and score 30. There is no four-dice straight.
- A Yacht can be taken on Four of a Kind, where it scores four of the dice, but it is not a Full House.
How a game ends
- After twelve rounds every row on every card is used and the highest total wins.
- Two to four people can play, and a table of four takes no longer than a table of two, because everybody rolls at the same time.
- Level at the top is a draw. Above two players, everyone is placed in order of their total.
- A player who resigns, or who runs out of time with nobody able to cover their seat, is placed last and the rest keep their order.
- The move deadline you pick when the game is made is a deadline for the whole round, not for each roll: roll, reroll and take a row within it. A game is twelve rounds and so twelve deadlines, whether two people are playing or four.
Worth knowing before you start
- Every roll comes from the game's seed, so nobody can influence a die and nobody knows what is coming.
- Your card shows what each free row would score for the dice in front of you, so there is no arithmetic to do.
- Spend the cheap rows on bad hands. Throwing away Ones costs you five points at most; throwing away Yacht costs you fifty.
- The bot plays at one of three strengths, drawn per game from the seed: one keeps the commonest number and rerolls twice whatever happens, and the other two work out which dice to keep and what a row is worth spending.
Every die in a game comes from its seed, which is published when the game ends, so anybody can replay the whole thing and check every roll.