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How to Play Yahtzee

In a nutshell: The classic - Five dice, three rolls, thirteen categories. You play with 5 dice and up to 3 rolls a turn across 13 scoring cells. It's rated easy to learn, and a good game scores 250+ (the theoretical maximum is 1,575).

Yahtzee is the world's most popular dice game - Five dice, up to three rolls per turn, and a scorecard of thirteen categories that you must fill exactly once each. After every roll you choose which dice to keep and which to throw again, then commit the result to a category: the six number rows of the upper section, or the combination rows below - three and four of a kind, full house, the straights, chance, and the almighty five-of-a-kind Yahtzee worth 50 points. The genius of the game is that every turn is a small exercise in probability and risk: chase the 35-point upper bonus, gamble on the big straight, or bank a safe Chance before the dice go cold. Luck deals the rolls, but the scorecard decisions are all skill.

Yahtzee at a glance

Goal	Fill all thirteen scorecard categories, one per turn, for the highest possible total. Each category can only be scored once - Choose wisely.
Dice	5 six-sided dice, up to 3 rolls per turn
Categories	13
Difficulty	Easy to learn
Good score	250+
Family	Classic

Step by step

History of Yahtzee

Yahtzee is a young classic with an old family tree. Sailors and gamblers had been playing five-dice scoring games for generations - the English game Yacht was published in 1938, South America had Generala, and Scandinavia its Yatzy - all built on the same idea of rolling five dice up to three times and scoring combinations.

The trademark story begins, fittingly, on a boat. In the mid-1950s a Canadian couple played their own version aboard their yacht and asked toy entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe - already famous for commercializing bingo - to make up a few sets as gifts for friends. Lowe recognized the hook immediately, bought the rights (reportedly for the cost of the first thousand sets), and began selling the game as "Yahtzee" in 1956.

Early sales were slow until Lowe hit on Yahtzee parties: the game demonstrates poorly in an ad and brilliantly at a table. Word of mouth did the rest. Milton Bradley acquired Lowe's company in 1973, Hasbro later absorbed Milton Bradley, and the little five-dice game now sells tens of millions of copies a decade in dozens of digital and physical forms.

How to Win at Yahtzee: Strategy

💡 Top tip: Play for the 35-point upper bonus from turn one: it's the single most reliable scoring swing in the game, and it needs only an average of three dice per number.

Winning tips, in order of importance

1. Keep the pair or triple of the highest number after your first roll unless a straight is genuinely live - Fives and sixes drive both the bonus and the of-a-kind rows.
2. Never zero the Yahtzee row early; a 50-point category (plus 100-point bonuses) is worth protecting deep into the game.
3. Use Chance as a shock absorber: save it for a busted turn of big dice rather than wasting it on a mediocre roll you could score elsewhere.
4. Score bad turns into Ones or Aces - Sacrificing a 2-point row to protect a 40-point row is always the right trade.
5. Chase the Large Straight only when four of its five cards are already showing after roll one; drawing to an inside straight wastes rolls.
6. Count what's left: with only the Sixes and Yahtzee rows open, every re-roll decision writes itself.

Advanced tactics for Yahtzee

1. The expected value of a re-roll changes with the scorecard: three sixes are worth keeping for Sixes early, but late in the game the same dice may be better gambled on a Yahtzee.
2. When you roll a full house on the first throw, check the upper section first - 25 points is often less valuable than three-of-a-kind toward a bonus you're still chasing.
3. Protect exactly one dump row (usually Ones) for as long as possible; the players who lose are the ones forced to zero a big category in the last three turns.
4. Four of a kind with high dice is frequently better scored as Three of a Kind early, keeping the harder row open for a luckier turn.
5. If the Yahtzee row is already scored with 50, a second Yahtzee is a joker: take the 100 bonus, then score the corresponding upper row if it's open before burning a lower row.
6. In the endgame, compute both orders: scoring this turn's dice into row A then hoping for row B is often 15+ points different from the reverse.

Common Yahtzee mistakes to avoid

• Ignoring the upper bonus - 35 points for averaging three of each number is the most reliable swing in the game, so track your pace from turn one.
• Zeroing the Yahtzee row early - a 50-point category plus 100-point bonuses is worth protecting until the endgame forces your hand.
• Burning Chance on a mediocre roll - it is your only universal safety net, so save it for a genuinely busted turn of big dice.
• Chasing an inside straight - re-rolling three dice to hit one exact number wastes rolls that a pair of sixes would have banked.

Yahtzee Variations

Triple Yahtzee

The full scorecard three times over: three columns scored at x1, x2 and x3, letting you route hot rolls to the triple column. Thirty-nine cells of long-range planning.

Yatzy

The Scandinavian standard - pairs rows, fixed 15/20-point straights, sum-scored full house, and a 50-point bonus threshold of its own.

Painted/forced-sequence play

House rules where categories must be filled top to bottom - brutal, since the dice never care what row you're on.

Yacht

The 1938 ancestor: twelve categories, no bonuses of any kind, both straights worth 30, and no re-roll jokers. Purist scoring.

Maxi Yatzy

Six dice and twenty categories including Three Pairs, Villa and Tower - more dice, more combinations, more math.

Yahtzee FAQ

Still have a question about Yahtzee? Browse the full Yahtzee FAQ, look up a term in the Yahtzee glossary, print a score sheet for game night, or compare Yahtzee with the other games in the rules for every dice game.

Last updated 2026-07-03.

Why Yahtzee.now?

Yahtzee.now is built for people who actually play: instant games, one-click dice holding, live potential scores on every row, smart hints, and per-game statistics that live in your browser. Every classic is here - Yatzy, Maxi Yatzy, Triple Yahtzee, Generala and more - Plus something almost no dice site has: real online multiplayer, where you and a friend play the exact same rolls on different devices. Browse the full list of free dice games, or check the Yahtzee FAQ if you're new to the game.

Hosting game night instead? Print free Yahtzee score sheets, brush up on the rules of every variant, or settle arguments with the Yahtzee glossary.

Common questions about Yahtzee.now

Types of Dice Games

"Yahtzee" isn't a single game - It's the most famous member of a whole family of category dice games, sometimes called poker dice games. Dozens of variants exist around the world, but almost all of them share one loop: roll a handful of dice up to three times, hold what helps between rolls, then score the result in one box of a scorecard that only gets used once per category. The oldest branch is the commercial classics - Yacht, published in 1938, and the Yahtzee that E.S. Lowe built from it in 1956, later joined by the triple-scorecard Triple Yahtzee. A second branch is the Nordic Yatzy tradition, hugely popular across Scandinavia, which adds pair categories and scores its straights and full houses by their pips rather than fixed prizes - and scales up to six dice in Maxi Yatzy. A third branch is the world variants: South America's lean, fast Generala with its servida first-roll bonus, the colour-dice Kismet, and the Danish-Filipino marathon Balut. Games differ in how many dice you throw, how generous the bonuses are, and how much room the card leaves you to hide a bad turn - and that tells you almost immediately whether a game will be a breezy five-minute break, a tense exercise in category management, or a 28-round test of nerve.

Classic

The classics are the games most people picture when they hear "Yahtzee" - The boxed editions that sat in every family game cupboard. They range from the familiar 13-category scorecard of Yahtzee to the 39-cell juggling act of Triple Yahtzee and the lean, bonus-free purity of Yacht, the 1938 original.

• Yahtzee - The classic - Five dice, three rolls, thirteen categories. Yahtzee is the world's most popular dice game - Five dice, up to three rolls per turn, and a scorecard of thirteen categories that you must fill exactly once each. (Easy to learn, 5 dice.)
• Triple Yahtzee - The classic scorecard, three columns deep - x1, x2 and x3. Triple Yahtzee plays the classic thirteen-category scorecard three times over in a single game. (Hard, 5 dice.)
• Yacht - The 1938 original - Twelve categories, no bonuses, pure scoring. Yacht is the game Yahtzee came from - published in 1938 and named for the yachting set who played it. (Easy, 5 dice.)

Nordic Yatzy

The Nordic branch scores by pips instead of fixed prizes and adds pair categories the American game never had. Yatzy is Scandinavia's household standard, and Maxi Yatzy raises the stakes with six dice, 20 categories, and a 100-point bonus that shapes every decision.

• Yatzy - The Scandinavian standard - Pairs, exact straights, and a 50-point Yatzy. Yatzy is the public-domain dice game every Scandinavian grows up with - the same five-dice, three-roll engine as Yahtzee, but a friendlier and in places trickier scorecard of fifteen categories. (Easy, 5 dice.)
• Maxi Yatzy - Six dice, twenty categories - The Nordic big board. Maxi Yatzy is Yatzy scaled up: six dice instead of five, and a twenty-category scorecard that exploits every combination the extra die makes possible. (Medium, 6 dice.)

World Variants

Five dice travel well. Generala rules the tables of South America with fixed prizes and its famous servida bonus, Kismet colours the dice to unlock flushes and a graduated bonus ladder, and Balut stretches the game into a 28-round marathon where every category must be filled four times.

• Generala - South America's five-dice classic - Servida bonuses reward first-roll strikes. Generala is the Yacht family's South American branch, the café and cup-and-dice game of Argentina, Uruguay and much of Latin America. (Medium, 5 dice.)
• Kismet - The 1964 challenger - Colored dice, a Flush row and a graduated bonus. Kismet is the 1964 'deluxe' challenger to Yahtzee, instantly recognizable by its colored pips: 1s and 6s are black, 2s and 5s are red, 3s and 4s are green. (Medium, 5 dice.)
• Balut - Seven categories, each scored four times - The expat classic from Manila. Balut is the Yacht family's long-distance runner - a Danish-Filipino game, born among expats in Manila after World War II and named after the local delicacy. (Hard, 5 dice.)

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