Dice

Getting the most out of thirteen turns

Every turn in Dice is a small gamble with three rolls, and the players who post big totals aren't luckier. They're better at deciding which category to fill and when to walk away from a roll. You roll five dice, hold the ones you want between rolls, and then commit the result to one of thirteen scoring boxes. Once a box is used it's gone, so the order you fill them in matters almost as much as the dice themselves.

The single most valuable box is the Yahtzee: five of a kind for 50 points. If a first roll gives you three matching dice, it's usually worth spending both re-rolls chasing it. But don't get tunnel vision. If a roll instead hands you a full house or a long straight, bank the sure thing rather than gambling it away on a five-of-a-kind that may never show.

The bonus is a pace, not a prize

The upper section, ones through sixes, pays a 35-point bonus once those six boxes total 63 or more. That number isn't random. Three of each value, from three ones up to three sixes, comes to exactly 63. So treat three-of-each as par. Four sixes puts you 6 over par. A lonely pair of threes puts you 3 under. Keep a running sense of where you stand and spend your strong rolls where they repair the damage. Sixes and fives are the heavy lifters: 24 from four sixes covers for a lot of weak twos. Players who ignore the pace wake up on turn eleven needing perfect fives and sixes, and the 35 points quietly walk away.

One turn, played out

Say your first roll is 4-4-6-3-1. The pair of fours is the only real asset, so hold them and roll the other three. They come back 4-2-5, and now you have three fours. Hold all three, roll the last two, and one of them lands a fourth 4 next to a 5. Now the choice. The four-of-a-kind box scores every pip on the table, here 21. The fours box scores 16 and puts you 4 over par toward the bonus. Early in the game the fours box is usually the better home, because a later lucky roll can still fill four-of-a-kind, while bonus pace is hard to rebuild. Late in the game, take whichever box you were about to sacrifice anyway.

Scoring smarter

• Feed the upper boxes steadily in the early turns; the bonus is often the difference between an average game and a great one.
• Keep Chance as a safety net for a turn that falls apart, not as an easy dump on turn one.
• When a roll is a total bust, sacrifice your ones or twos: a zero there costs far less than zeroing a big category.
• Straight math is blunt about which draws to chase. Holding 2-3-4-5, either a 1 or a 6 completes the run, and across two re-rolls that lands better than half the time. Needing one exact number to fill a gap succeeds barely three times in ten.
• Re-rolling all five dice after a bad start is almost never right. Even a lone six is worth holding if your sixes box is still open.

Where the game comes from

This is the classic five-dice game Edwin Lowe began selling as Yahtzee in 1956. Lowe was already rich from selling bingo sets, and the story goes that a Canadian couple showed him a dice game they had invented to pass time on their yacht. He liked it, bought the rights, reportedly for a thousand gift sets of the finished product, and gave it its name. Early ads flopped because the game reads as dull on paper, so Lowe threw Yahtzee parties instead and let people learn it hands-on. Word of mouth did the rest. Milton Bradley bought his company in 1973, and tens of millions of sets later the game is still the standard its ancestors, older pencil-and-paper games like Yacht and the South American Generala, never became. The math hasn't budged since: the odds of rolling five of a kind in a single throw are 1 in 1,296, which is exactly why landing one feels so good.