Game 106: Yahtzee

We've been using such online tools as Zoom and Skype and Facebook's Video Calling in these days of the COVID-19 pandemic and lock-down in order to play games with friends and family.  It can be challenging to find a game that works well in this format.  So far we've played Scattergories, general trivia games, and Quacks of Quedlinburg. But we're sad about not be able to find a way to play some of our standards such as Pinochle, and we're particularly missing our Pinochle partners, the Fromuths, during this crazy time in our world! Yahtzee was a recent suggestion from our friends the Kirks whose young sons (ages 4 and 6) have gotten very good at and have been playing with out-of-state family online.  David and I took them up on this idea, our sons, however, despite their love of playing games with the Kirk family, decided not to join in on Yahtzee. One son described as "too much like school: both boring and stressful" -- a sentiment with which the other agreed.  I can see what they mean, but I've always really liked dice games (though we rarely play any), and Yahtzee is nostalgic for me, plus it gave us a chance to play with our little buddies, so, yeah!  Hello Kirks!!  Bring it on!!

OBVIOUSLY we used to play Yahtzee a lot, and OBVIOUSLY we never throw away ANYTHING that's game-related.  Actually, one of these score sheets contains the signature of one of my childhood friends in her elementary-school handwriting, so this goes WAY back for me!

 I love the interesting looks my boys gave the professor in past years.  I think my favorite is the one on the top left, though I must say I'm wondering what's happening with the professor and the really big fish on the top right  .  .  .

We clearly have enough score pads to play many, many more games of Yahtzee!  Perhaps our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit these, or maybe we should just host a super humongous Yahtzee tournament once we're off lock-down!

I had forgotten that we have multiple versions of this.  We have a travel version and an electronic version, both of which had gotten rather lost on our shelves due to their small size.  This is one of those things that makes it hard to give an accurate count to the number of games on our shelves.  I'll just be counting all of this as one game, just as I count as one games with expansions, even if we have half a dozen such expansions, and as I sometimes count multiple games using a single standard deck of playing cards (of which we have dozens if not hundreds).  Hopefully it all comes out to a reasonably accurate estimate at the end of this counting process.

Ah!  And as I initially finished up this post and was putting the above away I found yet another version on our shelves: Yahtzee Deluxe!  It has a lovely velvet colored die-rolling area, but only one pencil holder, hmm  .  .  .

I can't find the box for our standard Yahtzee, so I think that may be one thing that we have thrown away.  I do remember that even back in my childhood days the raised slots in the box for dice and chips were already caving in, so we probably finally pitched that, but that is a rare event!  We currently keep the dice, cup, chips and score pads in a plastic storage container.  The picture below is from Wikipedia and matches what my game originally looked like.

Generally when I post about a game I give at least a bit of a description about how it's played.  I haven't done so with this one since it's been around for more than 60 years and is so well-known.  Briefly: I always kind of think of it as poker with dice  .  .  .  you're basically trying to get certain combinations on your rolls and scoring as stated on the score pad.  After your initial roll you can "keep" some dice and re-roll others up to two times if desired.  It's pretty straightforward.