Board game

Yahtzee

Atari console exclusive

Yahtzee is a homebrew game for the Atari 2600.

Released: —
Platforms: Atari 2600 Windows
Genres: Board game
Developers: —
Publishers: Milton Bradley Company
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric

About

Yahtzee is a dice game made by Milton Bradley (a company that has since been acquired and assimilated by Hasbro). It was first marketed under the name of Yahtzee by game entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe in 1956. The game is a development of earlier dice games such as Poker Dice, Yacht and Generala. It is also similar to Yatzy, which is popular in Scandinavia.

The objective of the game is to score points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations. The dice can be rolled up to three times in a turn to try to make various scoring combinations and dice must remain in the box. A game consists of thirteen rounds. After each round, the player chooses which scoring category is to be used for that round.

Keywords

homebrew

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

The overall concept of Yahtzee traces its roots to a number of traditional dice games. Among these are the game Generala and the English games of Poker Dice and Cheerio.

The most important predecessor of Yahtzee is the dice game Yacht, which is an English cousin of Generala and dates back to at least 1938. Wood classifies Yacht, and a similar three-dice game called Crag, as sequence dice games. Yahtzee is similar to Yacht in both name and content. Although Yahtzee is clearly derived from Yacht, it differed from it in a number of significant ways: