What is Generala?
From Argentina to Uruguay to Chile, Generala is the dice game on the table - shaken in a cup, slammed down, and scored on a card even leaner than Yahtzee's.
How Generala works
Generala uses five dice and three rolls per turn, just like Yahtzee, but the card is a tight 11 categories: Ones through Sixes up top, then Escalera (a straight, 20 points), Full (30), Poker - four of a kind - (40), Generala (50) and Double Generala (100). No upper bonus, no Chance box: every category is either earned or sacrificed.
The servida bonus
Generala's signature rule rewards instant luck: land a combo on the very first roll of your turn - servida, 'served' - and it's worth an extra 5 points. A first-roll straight pays 25 instead of 20, a first-roll Full 35 instead of 30. It's a small number with a big psychological punch, and it makes that opening cup-slam the most dramatic moment in the game.
Generala and the Yahtzee family
Generala predates Yahtzee and almost certainly influenced it - the shared skeleton of numbers-plus-combos is no coincidence, as Yahtzee's history shows. The lean card makes games quick and sacrifices frequent, so it's a sharper, more tactical ride than its northern cousins. It's also in the daily challenge rotation and plays head-to-head in multiplayer.
Related questions
Where does Yahtzee come from?
Yahtzee descends from a family of older dice games - Yacht, Generala and the Scandinavian Yatzy among them. Entrepreneur E. S. Lowe acquired the game from a Canadian couple who played it aboard their yacht, and marketed it as Yahtzee from 1956. Milton Bradley bought Lowe's company in 1973, and today Hasbro owns the trademark.
What is Kismet?
Kismet is a Yahtzee-style dice game with a twist: the pips are colored, with 1s and 6s black, 2s and 5s red, and 3s and 4s green. Color unlocks extra combos like the Flush - five dice of one color for 35 points - and the upper bonus is graduated, paying 35, 55 or 75 as your upper total climbs.
What is Balut?
Balut is a five-dice game with Danish and Filipino roots, built on a distinctive card: just 7 categories, but each must be filled four times, for 28 boxes in all. Balut itself is five of a kind, and since the category appears four times, a single game can demand you chase it again and again.