Maxi Yatzy

How to Play Maxi Yatzy

In a nutshell: Six dice, twenty categories - The Nordic big board. You play with 6 dice and up to 3 rolls a turn across 20 scoring cells. It's rated medium, and a good game scores 300+; six dice make big combinations routine and choices harder.

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. Alongside the familiar rows you get Three Pairs, a Full Straight (1 through 6 for 21 points), the Villa (two triples) and the Tower (four of a kind plus a pair). The upper bonus grows to 100 points at a threshold of 84, and six of a kind - the Maxi Yatzy itself - pays 100. More dice means more hits, but also more ways to waste a good roll: with twenty rows open, every turn is a genuine puzzle about which of four or five decent scores to actually take.

Maxi at a glance

Goal	Fill all twenty categories, one per turn. The upper bonus is 100 points at 84+, and six of a kind scores a 100-point Maxi Yatzy.
Dice	6 six-sided dice, up to 3 rolls per turn
Categories	20
Difficulty	Medium
Good score	300+
Family	Nordic Yatzy

Step by step

History of Maxi

Maxi Yatzy emerged in Sweden as the deluxe answer to a solved problem: families who had played thousands of Yatzy rounds wanted more decisions per game. Adding a sixth die multiplied the combination space, and the scorepad grew new rows to harvest it - Three Pairs, the two-triple Villa, the quad-plus-pair Tower and the all-six Full Straight.

Scorepad printers standardized the twenty-row card and the 84-point bonus through the later twentieth century, and Maxi pads now sit beside regular Yatzy pads in every Nordic supermarket.

The variant never needed a trademark or a marketing push; it spread the same way Yatzy did - by being obviously more of a good thing. Among serious dice players it's often considered the family's best pure game: more skill, more texture, and a bonus race that stays alive to the final turns.

How to Win at Maxi: Strategy

💡 Top tip: The 100-point bonus at 84 is the game - with six dice, expected upper scores are higher, so falling off bonus pace is a bigger leak than in classic Yatzy.

Winning tips, in order of importance

1. Three Pairs is rarer than it feels; when a first roll shows two pairs plus a spare, that row deserves the re-roll.
2. Full Straight (1-6, 21 points) uses all six dice with no spare - it's an exact hand, so treat near-misses skeptically.
3. Villa and Tower both sum six dice, so high triples and quads are worth far more - a 6-6-6-5-5-5 Villa is 33 points.
4. With twenty rows, mediocre rolls always fit somewhere - the skill is spending your CHEAP rows on them, not your premium ones.
5. Six of a kind is genuinely live (about 1.5% per optimal turn) - keep the Maxi row open while any quad keeps appearing.

Advanced tactics for Maxi

1. The sixth die changes keep-math: with four sixes after roll one, the double chase (Maxi + Sixes) is usually right, since either landing pays.
2. Score the structural rows (Villa, Tower, Three Pairs) early while dice are flexible; they're the hardest to hit on demand late.
3. The three straights compete for the same middles - a 2-3-4-5 core should be assigned to one straight target before you re-roll, not after.
4. Bonus arithmetic: 84 needs 14 points per row average; sixes and fives must overperform to carry ones and twos, so weight early keeps accordingly.
5. Endgame with only Chance and One Pair open plays itself; engineer your midgame so the hard exact rows are gone before the dice cool.

Common Maxi mistakes to avoid

• Ignoring the 84-point bonus pace - with 100 points on the line you need an average of 3.5 of each number, harder than it sounds.
• Filling Villa or Tower with weak dice - both score the sum of all six, so a 33-point Villa of sixes and fives is the real target.
• Chasing all three straights at once - Small, Large and Full Straight compete for the same middle dice; pick one target per turn.
• Panicking with twenty open rows - mediocre rolls always fit somewhere, so spend cheap rows on them and protect the exact ones.

Maxi Variations

Forced Maxi

Top-to-bottom filling with six dice - the hardest commonly played Yatzy of all.

Maxi with rolling bonus

House rules granting an extra roll after any scored Maxi Yatzy.

Twenty-row team play

Partners alternate turns on one card, a popular cabin variant.

Maxi FAQ

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

Last updated 2026-07-03.